Rediscovering joy

At the recommendation of a friend, I've been reading Andrew Solomon's Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression for my nonfiction. I'm only 94 pages into it, which is not very far. The book is close 500 pages of prose with a 40 page bibliography. It seems to cover depression from every different angle. 

On pages 34-37 the book tells the story of a Cambodian woman named Phaly Nuon, who survived the brutality of the Pol Pot's Killing Fields. For reference to how ruthless the regime was, one out of four people in Cambodia were murdered or died of starvation during that time. For the size of the population he ruled over, Pol Pot was many times worse than Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong.

Afterward, in a Thai refugee camp, she saw women who were wasting away PTSD and depression. She treated these women by following four steps: forgetting, working and loving; and then the most important step, teaching them that those three are all inter-related, part of a whole. Phaly has had so much success, that she has been a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize more than once.