Where the Roots Reach for Water: A Personal & Natural History of Melancholia

Not only a searing account of one man's battle against chronic depression, this deftly crafted memoir is also an intriguing cultural history of melancholy. After methodically planning to drown himself, spurred by a temporary paralysis he attributes to taking three different antidepressant drugs at once, Smith decided to go off his medication cold turkey instead. He initially tried homeopathy, psychotherapy and St. John's wort (a plant believed by some to have an antidepressant effect), with mixed results. Finally, he achieved a breakthrough when a spiritual crisis freed him from narrow self-absorption and instilled a faith that helped him face down existential despair. Far from a born-again confessional, Smith's largely secular philosophical examination of depression ranges across cultures and centuries, from the ancient theory that a humoral imbalance produces a saturnine disposition to the view, shared by Pueblo Indians and the Yoruba of Nigeria, of depression as ""soul loss,"" to the insights of evolutionary biologists and ""contemporary humoralists"" who believe that some individuals have an innately moody, risk-aversive temperament. Smith's personal odyssey extends from his Ohio Appalachian boyhood to Montana, where he worked as a case manager at a community mental health center, to North Carolina, where he engages in environmental activism. His conviction that depression has a spiritual dimension gives his graceful memoir wide-ranging appeal. (Sept.)