Maya Hollister 
Marcus from Tucson had tried three antidepressants over four years. His new psychiatrist did something the others had not. She wrote a real exercise depression prescription on a pad with her DEA number at the top: “Moderate-vigorous exercise, 150 minutes weekly, four sessions, beginning week one.” She also referred him to a behavioral health exercise … Read more
Hannah was 16, admitted to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital after months of restrictive eating that ended with a heart rate of 38 and a potassium of 2.7. Her parents, who had been begging her to eat for nearly a year, finally exhaled when she sat at the meal tray on day two and finished her oatmeal. … Read more
Jenna was thirty-four, an attorney in Austin, when she finally got the diagnosis that explained two decades of half-finished projects, lost keys, and panicked all-nighters. The psychiatrist prescribed a stimulant, which helped, and then said something Jenna did not expect. He said the medication was the floor, not the ceiling. He said she would still … Read more
Devon Pritchard had spent four years as a Cincinnati firefighter before the depression became something he could no longer outrun on a treadmill or drown at a craft brewery. The 33-year-old had failed sertraline, escitalopram, duloxetine, and a six-month trial of bupropion that gave him insomnia. His psychiatrist at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center … Read more
Eleanor, a 62-year-old retired schoolteacher from Asheville, North Carolina, had been in the geriatric psychiatry unit for nine days with a diagnosis of severe major depression. She would not eat. She would not speak. She lay in the same position for hours, her right arm raised slightly off the mattress as if she had been … Read more
Rebecca from Minneapolis came in for her annual physical in late February with a complaint that had become routine. She was tired all winter, irritable in ways she did not recognize as herself, sleeping ten hours and waking up unrefreshed, and her mood was creeping toward what she would have called depression in another context. … Read more
Sergeant First Class Daniel had served three deployments in Afghanistan with the Tenth Mountain Division when he came home to Watertown, New York, with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, a marriage on the brink, and the kind of insomnia that turns three in the morning into a familiar enemy. After eighteen months of trauma-focused … Read more
Marcus Halloway had been out of the Marine Corps for nine years when his wife Tasha, sitting in the parking lot of a community hospital ER in Tampa, pulled out her phone and called the Veterans Crisis Line instead. Marcus had been admitted to a private psych unit two years earlier after a suicidal episode … Read more
Why Finding a Therapist Is Harder Than Finding a Cardiologist The American mental health care system has produced an unusual paradox. There are more licensed therapists in the United States today than at any point in history, and yet finding the right one for an individual patient remains a process that most people describe as frustrating, opaque, … Read more
Tomás Reyes had been on Spravato for six weeks when the prior authorisation for his next dose got rejected by his insurer’s pharmacy benefit manager. He was sitting in a cubicle in Albuquerque watching his email inbox refresh, and on the other end of the chain was a dispenser at a specialty pharmacy in Memphis … Read more