After Depression

"After Depression" is an intensely personal and wide-ranging account about one person's decades-long struggle with mental illness and the experimental magnet-based medical device that ushered in a profound period of clarity and peace. This remarkable offering from award-winning journalist Gregory Harman moves deftly between stirring first-person narrative and solid research and will be of much interest to both those who suffer and the ones who love them. Overcoming depression is a critical challenge for tens of millions of people around the world. Many continue to suffer silently from this global epidemic due to the stigma that still surrounds mental illness. Harman hid his own illness for more than 20 years, despite the difficulties this created in his personal and professional lives. But a convergence of suicidal depression and raging panic attacks finally forced him to make recovery his primary concern. Quitting his job as a newspaper editor, he joined an experimental device trial promising relief via magnetic waves. This is the story of his involvement with synchronized transcranial magnetic stimulation (sTMS), the evolving world of brain medicine, and the depression epidemic at large. It is also, perhaps more significantly, a story about the human problem of suffering and the challenges and joys of recovery-a story of one person's ongoing effort to live meaningfully with illness and transform his life into one of service. It is a story of dreams, determination, spiritual conflict, and complicated histories. As the title suggests, it is a passionately recounted quest to discover what comes after depression.