Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me by Anna Mehler Paperny

Solved or unsolved, she discovers the truth from online testing for depression to the far frontiers of brain mapping, as well as the disturbing truth about just how primitive our methods of healing sick brains still are.

In search of answers, she interviews leading medical experts, from psychiatrists to neurologists, brain-mapping pioneers to family practitioners and others dabbling in strange hypotheses.

While trying to also be a good patient, Anna turns her investigative journalist's eye on the world around her-in the psych ward, as an outpatient, as a survivor enduring the grueling ordeal of facing concerned family, friends, and co-workers of finding the right meds, the right therapist of staying insured and employed. Many more suicide attempts followed that first in subsequent years.įollowing the dictum 'Know Thine Enemy,' Anna set out to meet and interview those on the front line of treatments. Her bosses found her passed out in her apartment having ingested a deadly mix of sleeping pills and blue antifreeze. (Apr.In her early 20s, having just landed her dream job as an investigative journalist, with a loving family and a strong social network, Anna Mehler Paperny nevertheless found herself spiraling into despair and a suicide attempt that landed her in the intensive care unit. This earnest and informative volume serves as a frank guide to those dealing with depression. Talking openly about suicide, she asserts, is crucial and in doing so here, she herself inspires in her determination to “punch” back at her illness. Due to depression’s human, societal, and economic costs, she writes, it “affects everyone,” and yet there is no overarching magic answer to this remarkably complex “shit sandwich of an illness,” and she lists options for those suffering, such as pharmaceuticals, psychotherapy, and electroconvulsive therapy. Mehler Paperny’s intense story begins in 2011 when, at 24, she ends up in the psych ward, having been discovered in her apartment after she drank antifreeze her subsequent suicide attempts included asphyxiation and overdosing on pills. This memoir cum cultural study segues between the author’s inexplicable obsession with killing herself (raised in a supportive family, she writes, her depression isn’t connected to an experiential trigger) and a review of medications and other approaches available to those struggling with depression. Journalist Mehler Paperny offers a startling and intimate portrait of her multiple attempts at suicide and digs into the disturbingly inadequate “toolbox” available to individuals suffering from acute depression.

Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me by Anna Mehler Paperny