Tag: depression

“I think a good way to describe my depression is an inability to feel happiness. It’s just this gray zone. I have this beautiful life that I can’t appreciate.”

Mathina Calliope goes off her antidepressant and into the woods.

After being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Anna Gazmarian grapples with her evangelical upbringing, and finds solace in screamo music.

Elizabeth Wurtzel’s bestseller is deeply rooted in a specific, Gen-X cultural moment. Can it still speak to us in 2019?

“I got home and went back to the fetal position for a week.”

Grieving the mysterious death of her father, Susanna Space seeks refuge in the study of meteors.

“…no one sober knows if they’re going to be sober forever. It was a forgiving moment, and it humbled me.”

“All you needed to do,” Springsteen says, “was to risk being your true self.” We ignore our demons at our peril.

After years of feeling hopeless and barely human, one talented writer manages to find her will to live.

Diane Mehta tries to manage anxiety with meditation that requires her to discard all her memories.

What can you do for a loved one with depression? Sometimes presence can make all the difference in the world.

Popular culture likes to depict electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) as sinister and dangerous. Leslie Kendall Dye reflects on the myths surrounding the treatment that saved her life.

Alex R. Jones starts grocery shopping late at night, and finds a new world opens up to him.

On a whirlwind book tour, Monica Drake fights to resist the pull of an emotional — and physical — abyss.

Kirsten Tranter is cleaning out her closet. But how does the Marie Kondo method work for a “depressive personality…for whom joy is often an elusive feeling”?

A severe form of PMS puts Chloe Caldwell’s new relationship to the test.

W.H. Auden named it 70 years ago, and our latest age of anxiety is one of Xanax, fidget spinners, and constant swiping.

Liz Phair and Elizabeth Wurtzel discuss the sexism they each are seeing everywhere.

For people with severe, depression, deep-brain stimulation offers an uncertain but potentially life-altering solution.

Christine Hyung-Oak Lee reflects on seeing and “being seen” — the silent gift of bearing witness to one another and individual suffering as a way of offering comfort and hope.

At Broadly, Gabby Bess — a writer who has depression — interviews life-long sufferer Daphne Merkin, and reviews Merkin’s new memoir, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning With Depression.

The theater and lit worlds suffered a great loss this week with the passing, Tuesday, of Elizabeth Swados, 64, a prolific writer and composer .

The day after Madison jumped, Jim walked to the top of the parking garage. He read the phrase, She had wings on. He spoke with Madison’s friends. He compiled clues. Then he stopped. He could spend his life trying, in vain, to make his child whole again, he thought. Or he could work to keep […]

Zoos contact Virga when animals develop difficulties that vets and keepers cannot address, and he is expected to produce tangible, observable results. Often, the animals suffer from afflictions that haven’t been documented in the wild and appear uncomfortably close to our own: He has treated severely depressed snow leopards, brown bears with obsessive-compulsive disorder and […]

Alan Shapiro | Virginia Quarterly Review| Fall 2006 | 20 minutes (4,928 words) Alan Shapiro published two books in January 2012: Broadway Baby, a novel, from Algonquin Books, and Night of the Republic, poetry, from Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt. This essay first appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review (subscribe here). Our thanks to Shapiro for allowing us to reprint […]

“It always helps to understand what’s happening, and to be able to understand your enemy. It helps you cope and helps you panic less. Now that I know what depression looks like and I know what the general steps are, there’s also a progression I can look at and feel comforted by. I can feel […]