| Summary: |
"Frank, eye-opening, heartbreaking and disarmingly funny, Anna Mehler Paperny is a fabulous, vibrant new voice. In her galvanizing memoir-meets-exposé, writing with riveting vitality and intelligence about surviving suicide and the ways we try to talk about and treat depression, she has discovered what eludes many: a way to reach out to us to talk about one of the increasingly concerning medical issues today. An energetic tour-de-force of empathy and desire for understanding, Hello! I Want to Die, Please Fix Me is compelling reading, as well as essential for anyone curious to understand how it feels to be depressed, or whose life, family or friends has been touched by depression. Anna Mehler Paperny is a young journalist from Toronto--a smart, passionate reporter who has contributed to the Toronto Star, Global News, The Globe and Mail, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and just about every major news outlet you can think of. In her early-twenties, while thriving in her dream job, enjoying warm familial support and a strong social network of friends and colleagues, Anna found herself trapped by feelings of failure and despair. In September 2011, she made her first attempt to kill herself by ingesting a deadly mix of sleeping pills and antifreeze, landing her in the ICU followed by weeks of enforced detention in two different big-city psych wards. This was Anna's entry point into the labyrinthine psychiatric care system--one that is nominally responsible for providing the best reasonable care to millions of Canadians suffering from severe, life-threatening mental illness. Her first stay in the psych ward--at times horrifying, other times boring, hilarious and absurd--was just the beginning of a long recovery and a journey towards understanding, first-hand, the myriad ways our systems and medical practitioners treat--and fail to treat--a disease that afflicts a full fifth of the population. While trying to be a good patient, Anna cannot help but turn her intrepid journalist's eye on the world around her--in the psych ward, as an outpatient, as a survivor enduring the gruelling ordeal of facing concerned family, friends and co-workers; of finding the right meds, the right therapist; of staying insured and employed. Anna's personal account of life in the shadow of self-obliteration explores in searing detail her individual experience of depression, close encounters with fatal self-harm, and the trials and errors of treatment. It is at the same time an illuminating, profound, and utterly original analysis of how we approach mental illness in North America; the novel hypotheses specialists are putting forward to tackle it; and the truth about how primitive our methods of healing sick brains still are."-- Provided by publisher. |
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