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Author Merkin, Daphne, author.

Title This close to happy : a reckoning with depression / Daphne Merkin.

Publication Info. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [2017]
©2017

Copies

Location Call No. Status
 Avon Free Public Library - Adult Department  616.8527 MERKIN    Check Shelf
 Berlin-Peck Memorial Library - Non Fiction  616.8527 MERKIN    Check Shelf
 Canton Public Library - Adult Department  616.8527 MERKIN    Check Shelf
 Cheshire Public Library - Adult Department Lower Level  BIOGRAPHY MERKIN    Check Shelf
 East Hartford, Raymond Library - Adult Department  B MERKIN DAPHNE M    Check Shelf
 Enfield, Main Library - Adult Department  616.8527 MER    Check Shelf
 Manchester, Main Library - Non Fiction  616.8527 MERKIN    Check Shelf
 Mansfield, Main Library - Adult Nonfiction  616.8527 MERKIN    Check Shelf
 Middletown, Russell Library - Adult Nonfiction  616.8527 MER    Check Shelf
 New Britain, Main Library - Non Fiction  616.8527 M54    Check Shelf

Edition First edition.
Description 288 pages : portrait ; 22 cm
Summary "This Close to Happy is the first account to endeavor to tell the story of what it feels to suffer a lifetime's worth of clinical depression from the inside out and from a woman's point of view"-- Provided by publisher.
"Despair is always described as dull," writes Daphne Merkin, "when the truth is that despair has a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottled silver." This Close to Happy--Merkin's rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression--captures this strange light. Daphne Merkin has been hospitalized three times: first, in grade school, for childhood depression; years later, after her daughter was born, for severe postpartum depression; and later still, after her mother died, for obsessive suicidal thinking. Recounting this series of hospitalizations, as well as her visits to myriad therapists and psychopharmacologists, Merkin fearlessly offers what the child psychiatrist Harold Koplewicz calls "the inside view of navigating a chronic psychiatric illness to a realistic outcome." The arc of Merkin's affliction is lifelong, beginning in a childhood largely bereft of love and stretching into the present, where Merkin lives a high-functioning life and her depression is manageable, if not "cured." "The opposite of depression," she writes with characteristic insight, "is not a state of unimaginable happiness ... but a state of relative all-right-ness." In this dark yet vital memoir, Merkin describes not only the harrowing sorrow that she has known all her life, but also her early, redemptive love of reading and gradual emergence as a writer. Written with an acute understanding of the ways in which her condition has evolved as well as affected those around her, This Close to Happy is an utterly candid coming-to-terms with an illness that many share but few talk about, one that remains shrouded in stigma. In the words of the distinguished psychologist Carol Gilligan, "It brings a stunningly perceptive voice into the forefront of the conversation about depression, one that is both reassuring and revelatory"--Dust jacket.
Subject Merkin, Daphne -- Mental health.
Merkin, Daphne. (OCoLC)fst00165277
Depression in children -- United States -- Biography.
Depression in women -- United States -- Biography.
Postpartum depression -- Treatment.
Postpartum depression -- United States -- Biography.
Depressed persons -- Biography.
Women -- Health and hygiene.
Psychotherapist and patient.
Mental health. (OCoLC)fst01016339
Postpartum depression. (OCoLC)fst01073212
Psychotherapist and patient. (OCoLC)fst01081724
Women -- Health and hygiene. (OCoLC)fst01176758
United States. (OCoLC)fst01204155
Depressed persons. (OCoLC)fst00890902
Autobiography. (OCoLC)fst00822597
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs.
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs.
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Medical.
PSYCHOLOGY / Psychopathology / Depression.
Depression.
Genre/Form Autobiographies.
ISBN 9780374140366 (hardback)
0374140367 (hardback)
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