Excerpt from The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

By the time Phaly Nuon told me this, we had both moved to the floor between our seats, and she was weeping and rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet, while I sat with my knees under my chin and a hand on her shoulder in as much of an embrace as her trancelike state during her narrative would allow. She went on in a half-whisper. After the war was over, she found her husband. He had been severely beaten around the head and neck, resulting in significant mental deficit. She and her husband and her son were all placed in a border camp near Thailand, where thousands of people lived in temporary tented structures. They were physically and sexually abused by some of the workers at the camp, and helped by others. Phaly Nuon was one of the only educated people there, and, knowing languages, she could talk to the aid workers. She became an important part of the life of the camp, and she and her family were given a wooden hut that passed for comparative luxury. "I helped with certain aid tasks at that time," she recalls. "All the time while I went around, I saw women who were in very bad shape, many of them seeming paralyzed, not moving, not talking, not feeding or caring for their own children. I saw that though they had survived the war, they were now going to die from their depression, their utterly incapacitating post-traumatic stress." Phaly Nuon made a special request to the aid workers and set up her hut in the camp as a sort of psychotherapy center.

She used traditional Khmer medicine (made with varied proportions of more than a hundred herbs and leaves) as a first step. If that did not work or did not work sufficiently well, she would use occidental medicine if it was available, as it sometimes was. "I would hide away stashes of whatever antidepressants the aid workers could bring in," she said, "and try to have enough for the worst cases." She would take her patients to meditate, keeping in her house a Buddhist shrine with flowers in front of it. She would seduce the women into openness. First, she would take about three hours to get each woman to tell her story. Then she would make regular follow-up visits to try to get more of the story, until she finally got the full trust of the depressed woman. "I had to know the stories these women had to tell," she explained, "because I wanted to understand very specifically what each one had to vanquish."

Once this initiation was concluded, she would move on to a formulaic system. "I take it in three steps," she said. "First, I teach them to forget. We have exercises we do each day, so that each day they can forget a little more of the things they will never forget entirely. During this time, I try to distract them with music or with embroidery or weaving, with concerts, with an occasional hour of television, with whatever seems to work, whatever they tell me they like. Depression is under the skin, all the surface of the body has the depression just below it, and we cannot take it out; but we can try to forget the depression even though it is right there.

"When their minds are cleared of what they have forgotten, when they have learned forgetfulness well, I teach them to work. Whatever kind of work they want to do, I will find a way to teach it to them. Some of them train only to clean houses, or to take care of children. Others learn skills they can use with the orphans, and some begin toward a real profession. They must learn to do these things well and to have pride in them.

Copyright © 2001 by Andrew Solomon