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for a long time. I lived with blinding depression and had long stretches when everything seemed hopeless and pointless—when returning calls from friends seemed like more than I could do, when getting up and going out into the world seemed painful, when I was completely crippled by anxiety.
    When I finally got better and started writing about the process of recovery, I became very interested in all the different kinds of treatment that there were for depression. And having started as a kind of medical conservative, thinking that there were only a couple of things that worked—medication and certain talking therapies—and that that was really it, I very gradually began to change my mind. Because I realized that if you have brain cancer and you decide that standing on your head and gargling for half an hour every day makes you feel better, it may make you feel better, but the likelihood is that you still have brain cancer, and you’re still going to die from it; but if you have depression and you say that standing on your head and gargling for half an hour makes you feel better, then you areactually cured, because depression is an illness of how you feel. And if you feel really great after you do that, then you’re not depressed anymore. So I began to think all kinds of things could work.
    I researched everything from experimental brain surgeries to hypnotic regimens of various kinds. I had people writing to me because I had been publishing on this subject. There was one woman who wrote to me that she had tried medication, therapy, electroshock treatments, and a variety of other approaches to depression, and she had finally found the thing that worked for her, and she wanted me to tell the world about it. And that was “making little things from yarn”… some of which she sent me. In any event, I had that rich engagement.
    As I was doing this work, I also became interested in the idea that depression exists not only in the civilized West, as people tended to assume, but also across cultures, and across time.
    And so when one of my dearest friends, David, who was living for a little while in Senegal, said to me, “Do you know about the tribal rituals that are used for the treatment of depression here?” I said, “No, I don’t know about them. But I would like to know about them.”
    And he said, “Well, if you come for a visit, we could try to do some research on this topic.”
    And so I set off for Senegal, and I met David. And I was introduced to David’s then-girlfriend, now ex-wife, Helene. And it turned out that Helene had a cousin whose mother was a friend of someone who went to school with the daughter of a person who actually practiced the
ndeup
, the ritual David had mentioned, and that I could therefore go and interview this woman who had practiced the
ndeup
.
    And so we went off to a small town about two hours outside of Dakar. And I was introduced to this extraordinary, old, large woman wrapped in miles and miles of African fabric printed with figures of eyes, and she was Madame Diouf. And we did an interview for about an hour, and she told me all about the
ndeup
. At the end of it, feeling rather daring, I said, “Listen, I don’t know whether this is something you would even consider, but would it be possible for me to attend an
ndeup
?”
    And she said, “Well, I’ve never had a
toubab
attend one of these before [the local word for foreigner was
toubab
], but you’ve come through friends. Yes, the next time I perform an
ndeup
, you may be present.”
    And I said, “That’s fantastic. When are you next going to be doing an
ndeup
?”
    And she said, “Oh, it’ll be sometime in the next six months.”
    I said, “Six months is quite a long time for me to stay here in this town, waiting for you to do one. Maybe we could expedite one for somebody, move it forward? I’ll pitch in.”
    She said, “No, it really doesn’t work that way. I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.”
    I said, “Well, I