knowledge at your tips
Marcus was sitting in his Phoenix apartment at 2 a.m. with a bottle of his mother’s old hydrocodone in one hand and his phone in the other. The 31-year-old warehouse supervisor had not slept in four days. His sister had moved out the previous weekend, his lease renewal letter had arrived Tuesday, and the panic … Read more
Marisol had spent eleven years managing Ehlers-Danlos syndrome before she finally tried therapy in Tucson. The first counselor told her that her chronic pain was “psychosomatic” and suggested she try yoga. The second one kept asking, with kind eyes, when she planned to “get back to normal.” By the third intake, Marisol cried in the … Read more
Eleanor Park, a 34-year-old graphic designer in Minneapolis, started keeping a notebook on her nightstand the week she finally admitted to her therapist that her anxiety had quietly tripled since the start of the year. Her therapist did not prescribe a complicated protocol. She simply asked Eleanor to write for fifteen minutes before bed, four … Read more
Marcus Reyes, a 41-year-old emergency-room nurse in Tucson, picked up knitting after his second pandemic burnout. He chose it almost at random. A coworker brought a half-finished baby blanket to a debrief and Marcus, who had spent the previous month doomscrolling between shifts, asked her where she had bought the yarn. Six months later he … 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
Eight months after the stroke that took the right side of his face and most of his short-term memory, Marcus sat in his Cleveland kitchen and tried to explain to his wife why he had cried during a paint commercial. He used to be the kind of man who fixed things. Now he could not … 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