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A frustrating plumbing problem coincided with a weekly visit from Deevers' 300-pound, severely autistic, and often violent adult son. The resultant stress slowed time, reminding him of the beach scene in Saving Private Ryan, and his "eyes and ears los[t] traction with reality simultaneously…. Then the darkness happened." Without an ounce of self-pity but plenty of deflective humor, the chronically depressed Deevers narrates thirty-one days of his mental break during the COVID-19 pandemic with vivid language that commands attention. As a double depressive (persistent depressive disorder and major depressive disorder), he offers to "autograph your Prozac bottle." He says his writing will "jump around like a meth fiend in a bouncy castle." But it doesn't. Instead, this married, fifty-something, self-employed financial advisor and father of three writes a helpful, humorous, and honest book about his most recent pursuit of better ways to manage lifelong depression and anxiety.
Knowing depression is personal and prevalent, Deevers speaks directly to the reader in an intimate conversational style. He trusts the reader enough to develop a rapport while promising he "won't make it weird and talk about my freezer filled with body parts or my closet full of leather whips." His particular depression began vividly at age thirteen as he lay in the grass on a picture-book summer's day in 1981. Suddenly, a "black floating void" appeared that filled him with "sorrow and darkness" and never really left. Suicide attempts followed, along with institutionalization, drinking, divorces, a plantar wart, and half-hearted therapy. He became an expert at people-pleasing, telling therapists what they wanted to hear, building a façade of understanding, then creating a faux breakthrough before walking out "half-cured, still wholly broken." But the magic of his recent meltdown has made him work the therapy plan this time around and has provided him with the courage to share it.
Each morning during these thirty-one days begins the uphill struggle, "once more into the fray," and toward the "three dwarf dingoes" he herds (with hilarious commentary) through Oregon's suburban "outback." The heavenly panacea of coffee follows, described daily with drooling sensuality. Work, online therapy, family time, and dinner unfold, but not with mundanity. He renders each day unique by wryly penning past and current traumas and ways of coping (or not coping). For instance, he tells his readers not to commit "self-schadenfreude," not to waste energy on upholding appearances except where vital for survival, not to glue self-worth to failure or success, and above all, not to kill oneself. Instead, one should exercise, breathe and meditate, practice mindfulness, apply self-compassion, be aware of triggers, and take advantage of the good times.
Many authors have laid bare their mental health struggles. Literary depressives include Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar), Virginia Woolfe (Mrs. Dalloway), Andrew Solomon (The Noonday Demon), Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted), William Styron (Darkness Visible), Daniel Smith (Monkey Mind), Jenny Lawson (Furiously Happy), and dozens more. Deevers joins their ranks, admittedly as more of a Smith-Lawson/Plath-Styron amalgam. For example, the Deevers' Rabbit Hole Scale, based on Dante's seven circles of hell, is either seriously funny or comically serious. Pep talks compare days of mental balance to "a shot of B₁₂ and ground rhino horn right to the veins."
Depressives will see themselves in this honest, endearing, helpful, and frightfully humorous book about one man's lifelong journey toward mental health. Meanwhile, non-depressives will learn and perhaps understand the struggles of a loved one. Fresh, vivid language pauses the brain at just the right moment to ponder the significance of what Deevers had the courage to chronicle for thirty-one days in the summer of 2020. A moving and surprising epilogue caps the journey.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review