Hannah, a 22-year-old graduate student in Boston, started her first semester of a neuroscience PhD program in good health and ended it on a locked psychiatric ward, then a neurology floor, then a neurocritical care unit, with a diagnosis no one in her family had ever heard of. The first symptoms were flu-like and unremarkable: … Read more
Hannah was fifteen, a varsity cross-country runner in Boulder, Colorado, and the kind of straight-A student parents brag about at dinner parties. Her mother Karen first noticed something off when Hannah started cooking elaborate meals for the family but eating only small portions of plain vegetables herself. By winter break, Hannah had lost twenty-two pounds. … Read more
Diego, a 41-year-old construction supervisor in Albuquerque, was started on a six-week taper of high-dose prednisone for severe poison oak dermatitis after a hiking trip. By the second week he was sleeping three hours a night, talking faster than his wife had ever heard, planning to refinance the house to fund a side business in … Read more
Marcus, a 34-year-old graphic designer in Sacramento, dropped his health insurance in January after his freelance contracts dried up. He figured he was healthy, the federal penalty was zero, and he could pocket the $480 monthly premium. Three months later, a panic attack at a coffee shop turned into a six-hour emergency room visit, a … Read more
Priya, a 28-year-old graphic designer in Minneapolis, started aripiprazole for bipolar II depression on a Friday and by Monday morning she could not sit through a meeting, could not lie still in bed, could not stop pacing the apartment her husband had begun watching her circle like a zoo animal. She described the feeling as … Read more