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that can leave parents in the dark about how their children are feeling. (I’ll also never forget a conversation in which I told my mother that I actually remembered most of high school fondly, as a happy and exciting time. “What?!” she almost screamed at me, so surprised was she to hear this. “But you were so . . . horrible!”) It can also leave everyone confused about what feelings are to be considered normal. Sometimes this miscommunication can be perceived in hindsight as tragic. Teresa, a twenty-five-year-old in Iowa, wrote to me about finally receiving effective treatment in her twenties for the depression she’d first started to feel at age seven. She described it as “this horrible malaise that would gradually deepen into sleeping all the time (seriously, I would come home, go to bed at 4:00 P.M ., and wake up at 7:00 A.M . to go back to school. And I’d do this every day).” Teresa always felt that her problems were an illness that needed medical attention. She pushed her parents to get her some help, but with no luck:
     
    My parents didn’t take me to the doctor because (a) they couldn’t afford it, and (b) they assumed it was just teenage angst and anxiety, not something “really wrong.” They’ve since told me that they regret it immensely.
    —Teresa, age twenty-five
    Because everyone I interviewed for this book took antidepressants, they all at some point received a diagnosis—for depression, an anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or one of the hundreds of other conditions in the DSM. Getting a “label” is an important step. Not only does it usher one into the world of pill-taking, but almost by definition, it also has a bearing on one’s sense of identity. Nearly everyone I talked to reacted strongly to being diagnosed. But these reactions ran to two polar extremes.
    About half of the people I talked to found getting a diagnosis to be an enormous relief. As I discussed in the last chapter, our society over the last thirty years has moved away from seeing many common mental problems as psychological in nature, and toward seeing them as medical—less like facets of personality, and more like diseases that you develop or “catch.” These days, diagnosis confronts people with a biomedical explanation for their suffering. Some people specifically told me they took comfort in the biomedical view that came along with their diagnosis. Thinking of their problems as concrete and physical allowed them to say, at last, “It’s not my fault!” They also mentioned the benefits of feeling like they were part of a group, and of finally having an explanation for a set of feelings that had once seemed frighteningly strange.
     
    When I got my diagnosis, I felt absolutely relieved. Finally I wasn’t just crazy . I had something literally physically wrong with me. And more than that, I had hope that it would go away, or at least get better.
    —Teresa, age twenty-five
     
    To tell you the truth, I think it was probably very comforting. Having depression was kind of saying you belong to a group. I mean, everybody’s alone in their sadness, but [to be diagnosed was] to say that you’re not necessarily alone-alone in your sadness. At the time, though, I didn’t know that there were any other people my age who were having that. But calling it depression was comforting, yes.
    —Abby, age twenty-eight
     
    I didn’t get a proper diagnosis until college. I think I was so relieved actually. And I think it’s really because, when you get hit with mental illness, you do not know what you are hit with. And it’s the mystery of the illness that is terrifying. With mental illness, there are horrible things happening to you and you don’t know what it is, and first getting diagnosed or first getting help is the best thing, because from there on, you’re aware that, like—“What is this thing? Let me pick it apart, and let me deal with it.” And when you pick it apart, it’s not that