How to Be Depressed

George Scialabba is an essayist and literary critic whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, The Baffler, The Boston Globe, Dissent, and many other journals. His writings have been collected in five volumes: Slouching Toward Utopia, Low Dishonest Decades, For the Republic, The Modern Predicament, and What Are Intellectuals Good For?

"Scialabba has spent most of his career watching his country fall apart: grandiose adventurism abroad, wealth concentrated in ever fewer hands, meanness and cruelty exalted as civic virtues. Somehow he has not given up hope of progress, and the battered optimism of his other books is all the more moving when read in light of this one...His experience, painstakingly recorded, is not remotely glamorous. He has been to hell, many times, but emerged with no unexpected insights, nor any confidence that he will not return there. The only comfort he has to offer is that depression, if it does not kill you, will eventually lift—at least for a time." (The New York Review of Books) "A new memoir by George Scialabba, an unsung giant of criticism, is a gripping portrait of life under the spell of depression-and also a model of true intellectual inquiry . . . [O]ne is grateful for the characteristically insightful and socially committed thought that Scialabba brings to the thorny issue of clinical depression." (The American Interest) "[A] brilliant and unusual contribution to the literature of depression . . . . . . By sharing his struggles, Scialabba has provided not just a profound account of depression, but a reminder of how precarious our lives can be, and how much we need each other . . . Scialabba is one of the best social critics of our time." (Commonweal) "Scialabba has been one of the finest observers of American politics and culture since the 1980s; his essays and reviews, on everything from Vietnam to Christopher Lasch to the Bush/Cheney administration to the aftermath of the Great Recession, are a rich education..{T]his is one of the better books on depression that has appeared since the turn of the century, and it belongs in the Scialabba collected library that hopefully a scholar will compile someday."" (Los Angeles Review of Books) "Intentionally or not, this book is a devastating critique of psychiatry. At its center is a brilliant man struggling for decades with intractable depression. While he writhes in agony, his therapists toss out sometimes contradictory diagnoses, try every possible drug, and compulsively recalibrate dosages. But year in and year out, their patient's actual experience continues to elude them. Still, I finished How To Be Depressed with hope that psychiatry can change-if its practitioners are willing to listen, really listen, to patients like Scialabba." (Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Natural Causes) "This is the most shocking report on lifelong depression I have ever read: the depression intractable, the report heartbreaking" (Vivian Gornick, author of The Odd Woman and the City) "A remarkable achievement. Assembling a collage of essay, interview, and his own medical records, George Scialabba remakes the memoir of depression. I can't think of another book that is so successful in evoking the relentlessness of recurrent depression. We see it for what it is: painful, tedious, and debilitating, able to interfere with every aspect of life." (Peter D. Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac)