Priya Iyer 
Patricia Whitfield, a 62-year-old retired schoolteacher in Cleveland, did not expect to need a project the week she retired. She had imagined the calendar opening up like a long, gentle summer. Instead, by week three, she had organised every drawer in her house, alphabetised her spice rack, and found herself crying in the produce aisle … Read more
The Cleveland paramedics had been to the same boarding house twice in a month, but the man tearing through the front yard at three in the morning was new. Devon, twenty-three, was barefoot in February snow, drenched in sweat, swinging at invisible attackers. His core temperature in the ambulance read one hundred and six. His … Read more
Brianna, a 34-year-old freelance graphic designer in Austin, Texas, sat at her kitchen table last November with four browser tabs open and a half-cold cup of coffee. She had been seeing a trauma therapist twice a month for almost a year and knew she needed to keep that going. Her old employer plan ended December … Read more
Maya was 15 and had been quietly losing weight since the previous October. Her parents in suburban Atlanta first noticed in November, when her ninth-grade school photos came back and her mother saw the hollows in her cheeks she had been hiding under bulky sweaters at the dinner table. By February she had missed 23 … Read more
Damon was 27 years old and standing in front of a Brooklyn arraignment judge for the third time in 14 months when his Legal Aid attorney asked, almost in passing, whether he might qualify for the Brooklyn Mental Health Court calendar instead of the regular criminal docket. He had been picked up for criminal trespass … Read more
Renata called her husband from a parking garage in Las Vegas at four in the morning, on the phone for the first time in two days, and asked him whether the kids would be okay if she did not come home. He kept her on the line while his neighbour drove him to the airport. … Read more
When Eleanor died at seventy-nine in her Sarasota, Florida, condominium, she left behind a thirty-eight-year-old son named Daniel who had lived with schizoaffective disorder since college. Eleanor had been careful her whole life. She had saved methodically. She had worked with her bank to draft a will that left Daniel half her estate, about $190,000 … Read more
It was 2:47 a.m. when Maya, a sophomore at the University of Michigan, finally typed the message into her residence hall group chat: “I don’t think I want to be here anymore.” Her roommate Ainsley, asleep until her phone buzzed, woke up, read the screen twice, and ran across the hallway barefoot. She had heard … Read more
On a Wednesday afternoon in Phoenix, Marisol noticed her hands trembling as she sat in her parked car outside her office. She had run out of her sertraline four days earlier because her psychiatrist’s portal kept rejecting the refill request. Sleep had collapsed. Her boss had pulled her aside that morning to ask if everything … Read more
By the second visit to the emergency room in three weeks, Priya’s husband finally said it out loud at the kitchen table in Austin. He could not keep doing this. Priya had been in weekly therapy for six months, on two psychiatric medications for four months, and she still spent most evenings curled on the … Read more