The Scar: A Personal History of Depression and Recovery

The Scar: A Personal History of Depression and Recovery

by Mary Cregan
The Scar: A Personal History of Depression and Recovery

The Scar: A Personal History of Depression and Recovery

by Mary Cregan

Paperback

$16.95
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Overview

A fearless, candid memoir interweaving the author’s descent into depression with a medical and cultural history of the illness. At the age of twenty-seven, married, living in New York, and working in book design, Mary Cregan gives birth to her first child, a daughter she names Anna. But it’s apparent that something is terribly wrong, and two days later, Anna dies, plunging Cregan into suicidal despair. Decades later, sustained by her work, a second marriage, and a son, Cregan reflects on and attempts to make sense of this pivotal experience. Weaving together literature and research with details from her longburied medical records, she writes of her own ordeal and the still-visible scar of a suicide attempt—while considering it as part of a larger history of our understanding of depression. She investigates the treatments she underwent, from hospitalization and shock therapy to psychotherapy and antidepressants. At once intimate and scholarly, The Scar illuminates a too often stigmatised affliction with compassion and intelligence and offers hope to all those who are still struggling.


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Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780393357851
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date: 03/24/2020
Pages: 256
Sales rank: 697,653
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Mary Cregan attended Middlebury College and received her PhD from Columbia University. She is a lecturer in English literature at Barnard College and lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

1 What Happened 1

2 What Happened Next 30

3 How to Save a Life 64

4 The Paradise of Bedlams 97

5 Where Do the Dead Go? 133

6 Early Blues 163

7 The Promise of Prozac 194

8 No Feeling Is Final 232

Acknowledgments 249

Notes 251

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