Mental health emergencies, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, mobile crisis teams, dual diagnosis, trauma and PTSD — care for the moments when waiting isn’t an option.
The Three AM Question It is three in the morning. You cannot sleep. Your chest feels tight. Your thoughts are spiraling. The anxiety that has been building for weeks has finally become unbearable. Or maybe it is not anxiety at all. Maybe the depression has shifted into something darker, something that makes you wonder whether … Read more
Priya, a 26-year-old graduate student in Boston, Massachusetts, had been bingeing and purging multiple times a day for almost five years. She had told one therapist about it, briefly, four years ago. Her boyfriend knew, more or less. Her family did not. The Saturday night that ended her secret began like most Saturday nights: a … Read more
Eleanor, a 64-year-old retired schoolteacher from Asheville, North Carolina, had been quietly drinking three or four glasses of wine every evening for almost two decades. Her family knew about it, the way families know these things and do not quite know what to do. The bigger worry, until that week, had been her appetite. She … Read more
Marcus, a 47-year-old construction foreman from Tulsa, Oklahoma, decided on a Sunday afternoon that Monday would be the day. He had been drinking a fifth of vodka most days for nearly fifteen years, with the occasional binge weekend stretching that to a half-gallon. His wife had begged him to stop. His doctor had warned him … Read more
Diego, a 22-year-old engineering student from Phoenix, Arizona, took half a tablet of what his friend swore was MDMA at an outdoor electronic music festival in late June. The desert temperature was 102 degrees at sunset and the dance floor was packed against a stage with no breeze. Two hours in he started to feel … Read more
Jasmine, a 29-year-old paralegal from Las Vegas, Nevada, was at a country music festival with her sister when the shooting started. She remembers the first few seconds clearly, the way the popping sound did not fit the night, the way the people around her hit the ground in a wave. After that her memory becomes … Read more
Tomas was a graphic design student in Austin who took LSD at a desert festival the summer before his junior year, had what his friends called a beautiful trip, slept it off in a campervan, and went home expecting to never think about it again. Three weeks later he was sitting in a fluorescent-lit lecture … Read more
Marisol arrived at a Phoenix emergency department on a Sunday night with her sister driving and her hands trembling so violently she could not sign her own intake form. For three weeks she had not slept more than two hours at a stretch, had stopped eating because swallowing felt like choking, and had begun whispering … 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
The volunteer firefighters in a small Kentucky town arrived at the abandoned barn around eleven on a school night and found Bryce, fourteen, cyanotic and pulseless on the dirt floor. A can of computer duster was clutched in his right hand. His best friend, sobbing nearby, said Bryce had been spraying it into a paper … Read more