Helen Plum Library

Yaa Gyasi's stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national best seller Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama. Gifty is a fifth year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked...

The author offers a look at depression in which he draws on his own battle with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, researchers, doctors, and others to assess the complexities of the disease, its causes and symptoms, and available therapies. This book examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications, the efficacy of...

"For years, Heather B. Armstrong has alluded to her struggle with depression on her website, dooce. It's scattered throughout her archive, where it weaves its way through posts about pop culture, music, and motherhood. But in 2016, Heather found herself in the depths of a depression she just couldn't shake, an episode darker and longer than anything she had previously experienced... Heather decided to risk it all by participating in an experimental...

"Baek Sehee is a successful young social media director at a publishing house when she begins seeing a psychiatrist about her - what to call it? - depression? She feels persistently low, anxious, endlessly self-doubting, but also highly judgmental of others. She hides her feelings well at work and with friends; adept at performing the calmness, even ease, her lifestyle demands. The effort is exhausting, overwhelming, and keeps her from forming deep...

"Sparkling, luminescent prose. A powerful portrait of one girl's journey through the purgatory of depression and back."--New York Times "A book that became a cultural touchstone."--New Yorker Elizabeth Wurtzel writes with her finger on the faint pulse of an overdiagnosed generation whose ruling icons are Kurt Cobain, Xanax, and pierced tongues. Her famous memoir of her bouts with depression and skirmishes with drugs, Prozac Nation is a witty and sharp...

"Charlotte McGanley knows happiness. Just ask anyone who's read Perfect Happiness, her bestselling book about how she, a busy mother and professor, used her no-nonsense positive psychology research to brighten her own life. She always pictured her career beginning and ending in the halls of academia, but now she's become a bit of a self-help guru. No one is more surprised by this than Charlotte herself, who has secretly never been more miserable....

Pushing away her devoted husband, a once-successful writer moves back into her bohemian childhood home, where she struggles to come to terms with the mental illness that has overshadowed her life There's something wrong with Martha, and has been for a long time. When she was seventeen a little bomb went off in her brain and she was never the same. At forty she spends days unable to get out of bed, and often alienates both strangers and her loved...

What is depression? Is it a persistent low mood or a complex range of symptoms? Is it a single diagnosis or a diversity of mental disorders requiring different treatments? In A Cure for Darkness, science writer Alex Riley explores these questions, digging into the long history of depression and chronicling the lives of psychiatrists and scientists who sought cures for their patients

The legendary rap star and cofounder of Run D.M.C. speaks out about his battle with depression and overcoming suicidal thoughts-- one of the most devastating yet little known health issues plaguing the black community today

"The Grammy-winning superstar and best-selling author of All That Is Bitter and Sweet shares the story of her struggles with depression, PTSD and addiction, a journey that included extended hospital stays and moving lessons about how to find hope and help, "--