Washoe County Library System

The best-selling author of Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs outlines revelatory arguments against common misperceptions about depression and anxiety, drawing on the work of social scientists who believe that the disorders are less related to brain chemical imbalances than to stressful factors in how people live today.

During the years he spends in a neural health facility, Pat Peoples formulates a theory about silver linings: he believes his life is a movie produced by God, his mission is to become physically fit and emotionally supportive, and his happy ending will be the return of his estranged wife, Nikki. When Pat goes to live with his parents, everything seems changed: no one will talk to him about Nikki; his old friends are saddled with families; the Philadelphia...

Although seventeen-year-old Amber Appleton is homeless, living in a school bus with her unfit mother, she is a relentless optimist who visits the elderly at a nursing home, teaches English to Korean Catholic women with the use of rhythm and blues music, and befriends a solitary Vietnam veteran and his dog, but eventually she experiences one burden more than she can bear and slips into a deep depression.

Abducted by aliens periodically throughout his youth, Henry Denton is informed by his erstwhile captors that they will end the world in 144 days unless he stops them by deciding that humanity is worth saving. After the suicide of his boyfriend, Henry deals with depression and family issues, all while wondering if he was really abducted and told he has 144 days to decide whether or not the world is worth saving.