02555cam a2200337 i 4500 296131142 TxAuBib 20170221120000.0 160819s2017||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 2016025616 9780374140366 0374140367 eng rda TxAuBib rda Merkin, Daphne. This close to happy [BOOK] : a reckoning with depression / Daphne Merkin. First edition. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. 288 pages ; 22 cm. txt rdacontent n rdamedia nc rdacarrier "A gifted and audacious writer confronts her lifelong battle with depression and her search for release This Close to Happy is the rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression, written from a woman's perspectiveand informed by an acute understanding of the implications of this disease over a lifetime. Taking off from essays on depression she has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, Daphne Merkin casts her eye back to her beginnings to try to sort out the root causes of her affliction. She recounts the travails of growing up in a large, affluent family where there was a paucity of love and of basics such as food and clothing despite the presence of a chauffeur and a cook. She goes on torecount her early hospitalization for depression in poignant detail, as well as her complex relationship with her mercurial, withholding mother. Along the way Merkin also discusses her early, redemptive love of reading and gradual emergence as a writer.She eventually marries, has a child, and suffers severe postpartum depression, for which she is again hospitalized. Merkin also discusses her visits to various therapists and psychopharmocologists, which enables her to probe the causes of depression and its various treatments. The book ends in the present, where the writer has learned how to navigate her depression, if not "cure" it, after a third hospitalization in the wake of her mother's death. ". 20170221. Merkin, Daphne Mental health. Psychotherapist and patient. Postpartum depression Treatment. Postpartum depression United States Biography. Depressed persons Biography. Women Health and hygiene. Biographies.