Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

HELLO! I WANT TO DIE, PLEASE FIX ME

Anna Mehler Paperny

Depression in the First Person

Award-winning journalist Anna Mehler Paperny's stunning memoir chronicles with courageous honesty and uncommon eloquence her firsthand experience of depression and her intrepid quest to explore what we know and don't know about this disease that afflicts almost a fifth of the populationproviding an invaluable guide to a system struggling to provide solutions and too often failing. As fascinating as it is heartrending, as outrageously funny as it is serious, it is a must-read for anyone touched by depressionand that's pretty much everybody.
Depression is a havoc-wreaking illness that masquerades as personal failing, hijacks your life and becomes an obsession. After a major suicide attempt in her early twenties, Anna Mehler Paperny resolved to put her reporter's skills to use to get to know her enemy, setting off on a journey to understand her condition, the dizzying array of medical treatments on offer and a profession in search of answers. Charting the way depression wrecks so many, she maps competing schools of therapy, pharmacology, cuttingedge
medicine, the pill-popping pitfalls of long-term treatment, the glaring unknowns and the institutional shortcomings that both patients and practitioners are up against. She interviews leading medical experts across Canada and the US, from psychiatrists to neurologists, brain-mapping pioneers to family practitioners and others dabbling in strange hypothesesand offers compassionate conversations with other sufferers.
Hello! I Want to Die, Please Fix Me tracks Anna's quest for knowledge and her desire to get fixed. Impeccably reported, it is a profoundly compelling story about the human spirit and the myriad ways we treat (and fail to treat) the disease that accounts for more years swallowed up by disability than any other in the world.
From the Preface: How do you talk about trying to die? Haltingly, urgently: in messages and calls to friends. Abashedly, gingerly: standing in the psych ward at the patients' landline, conscious of fellow patients watch¬ing TV just behind you, white corkscrew cord curled around your finger as you murmur to your grandmother who understands better than she should. Quietly, desperately: in one medical appointment after another. Trepidatiously: to colleagues. Searchingly: in interviews. Increasingly loudly. In a book? With the
world?

ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY is an award-winning reporter for Reuters based in Toronto. Over a decade for three news organizations she has chased stories in Haiti, Guantanamo Bay, China and Ontario, covering topics ranging from the opioid crisis to migration to the criminal justice system. Her work on deaths in Canadian prisons won an investigative journalism award. She has a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from Queen's University, Toronto, where she spent most of her time working for the campus paper.

Available products
Book Published 2019-08-01 by Random House Canada

Comments

[Paperny's] skill as a journalist is evident both in the seamless ease with which she moves from one topic to another and in her ability to break down complex ideas into accessible and engaging prose. . . . It's hard to imagine any group of people who wouldn't benefit in some way from reading this book. Those who have been through the system will feel less alone in their experiences, and those who haven't will gain necessary insight into what it's like. Paperny ends not with the story of a triumphant recovery or a miraculous cure, but a call to arms: let's fix this broken system. Her work will go a long way toward helping readers understand just how vital that need is.

Hyeonamsa

Raw, frank and dark-humoured. It's not a story of redemption or triumph. . . . But, in its unpretentiousness, the book is a must-read for those who want to understand what goes on in the heads of those who take their own lives each year . . . and the multiples more who, like the author, come perilously close. Ms. Mehler Paperny does a masterful job of delving into the complexities of living with depression, the challenges of getting the help you need and why it's so difficult to prevent suicide.

The Experiment (March 2020)

This book documents [Paperny's] effort to become acquainted with depression, for the sake of herself and others. She is a fine tour guide, with a reporter's rigour, strong narrative skills and self-deprecating humour.