Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

In her early 20s, having just landed her dream job as an investigative journalist, with a loving family and a strong social network, Anna Mehler Paperny nevertheless found herself spiraling into despair and a suicide attempt that landed her in the intensive care unit. Her bosses found her passed out in her apartment having ingested a deadly mix of sleeping pills and blue antifreeze. Many more suicide attempts followed that first in subsequent years.

Following the dictum "Know Thine Enemy," Anna set out to meet and interview those on the front line of treatments. While trying to also be a good patient, Anna turns her investigative journalist's eye on the world around her--in the psych ward, as an outpatient, as a survivor enduring the grueling ordeal of facing concerned family, friends, and co-workers; of finding the right meds, the right therapist; of staying insured and employed. In search of answers, she interviews leading medical experts, from psychiatrists to neurologists, brain-mapping pioneers to family practitioners and others dabbling in strange hypotheses. Solved or unsolved, she discovers the truth from online testing for depression to the far frontiers of brain mapping, as well as the disturbing truth about just how primitive our methods of healing sick brains still are.

Paperny's stunning memoir chronicles with courageous honesty and uncommon eloquence her firsthand experience of depression and her intrepid quest to explore what we know and don't know about the disease--and it provides an invaluable guide to a system struggling to provide solutions and too often failing. As fascinating as it is heartrending, as outrageously funny as it is serious, it is a must-read for anyone touched by depression--which is to say pretty much everybody.