Reviewed by Susan Phillips

This is a harrowing account of how the author's son Will, mired in a deep depression, tried to kill himself with an overdose of anti-depressant medications, of the ensuing long nightmare of looking for the right treatment, and of Will's eventual, provisional recovery. It starts on a March morning in 2001, when author Gail Griffith goes to wake up her 17-year-old son, and finds him delirious and incoherent in his bed.

From there, Griffith takes us along on Will's journey to the emergency room, hospital, psychiatric in-patient facility, countless therapy sessions, therapeutic boarding school in Montana, and finally home again, with side-trips through the family's emotional history, Griffith's own struggles with depression, expert views on the disease, Will's girlfriend's own experience with "cutting", and the family's battle to overcome the serious deficiencies in what our mental health care system offers for seriously depressed adolescents.

As the parent of two adolescent boys, living in the same city (Washington, DC), and familiar with many of the landmarks, institutions and schools that make up the background of Gail Griffith's book, this was a hard book for me to read and a hard book to put down. There's a cliché that comes to mind—"Every Parent's Nightmare"—only in this case, it seemed more like my personal nightmare, as lived by someone else.

Griffith negotiates the tricky emotional terrain of a book like this, which can seem like a terrible invasion of a child's privacy, in part by exploring her own role in such detail. Having been hospitalized for depression herself when Will was much younger, Griffith engages in some fierce maternal second-guessing, berating herself for not having fully acknowledged the depths of Will's depression. She takes a hard look at her divorce from her first husband and their remarriages, and wonders if they were too quick to assume that Will was weathering those storms as easily as it appeared.

And she works in enough research and discussion about adolescence, depression, and treatment to take the book out of the realm of pure memoir.

Will also contributes an epilogue, written in 2004, in which he acknowledges his discomfort with having his story told. "I'm not sure I really want anyone to know my so-called story," he writes. But he also explains how he faces the prospect of his depression returning in a way that makes it clear he does understand how other teens and adults could benefit from understanding what he's gone through. "I would be hard-pressed to handle it worse that I handled it the first time," writes Will. "I've pieced my sanity back together and the cracks have faded over time. If it comes apart again, I'll fix it again. But like a puzzle I've already solved, I now know where the pieces go."

The question that animates the book is, of course, why? Why would a bright young teenager with loving parents and siblings try to end his life? Griffith looks back at Will's infancy and early childhood, and his early claim to the territory of the easy, cheerful, happy-go-lucky kid. Was it the divorce? Was it taking too much at face value Will's insistence that he was not bothered by the divorce? Is it genetic? What about the antidepressant medications Will had been taking before his attempt?

(Griffith, by the way, while acknowledging the potential dangers of the newer antidepressants, comes down in favor of their remaining available. She can claim some particular expertise here: in 2004, she was the patient representative to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's scientific advisory committee charged with investigating the possible link between antidepressant medication and suicidal thinking in teenage patients.)

True to life, the question "Why?" is never answered to Griffith's satisfaction. Instead, she finds her satisfaction in Will's continued existence and in each day that he chooses to live.