Where the Roots Reach for Water

Jeffery Smith was living in Missoula, Montana, working as a psychiatric case manager, when his own clinical depression began. Eventually, all his prescribed antidepressant medications proved ineffective. Reversing the usual plotline of the modern-day "depression memoir," Where the Roots Reach for Water tells the story of what happened to Smith after he decided to give up his medications and make a life with his illness. Deftly woven into his "personal history" is a "natural history" of melancholia and its ancient links to love and sex, creativity, spirituality, and landscape.

Jeffery Smith lives with his wife in the Appalachian foothills of Coshocton County, Ohio, where he is at work on a novel and a narrative history of traditional Appalachian music.

"A subtle, personal, and powerful book about the geography and experience of melancholia." Kay Redfield Jamison, author of Night Falls Fast and An Unquiet Mind

"Jeffery Smith . . . has written a gripping personal memoir of the disease he calls by its early name, melancholia. He throws wonderful curve balls at his topic, using creative devices and poetic writing to get at the depth and range of depression." Cynthia Crossen, The Wall Street Journal

"Like Annie Dillard's Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, [it is] a compendium of one writer's reading and thinking on the subject . . . What makes it singular is the intellectual and moral seriousness with which [Smith] thinks and writes about his illness while in the grip of it . . . a searing account." Greg Bottoms, Salon