Scan barcode
melissafirman's review
emotional
sad
5.0
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), approximately 1 in 5 adults in the United States — 43.8 million people (or 18.5%) -- experiences mental illness in a given year. In April 2016, The New York Times reported that suicide in the United States is at its highest level in three decades and in 2014, the year beloved comedian and actor Robin Williams took his life, nearly 43,000 people did the same.
Yet so many remain silent because of the overwhelming stigma surrounding mental health.
What’s even more powerful, though, is sharing our stories of depression, anxiety, and suicide to let others know that they’re not alone.
Robin Williams’ death was the catalyst for author, screenwriter, editor and playwright Amy Ferris “to turn that deep sadness – that deep dark shade of blue – into action.” The result of her efforts is Shades of Blue: Writers on Depression, Suicide and Feeling Blue, an anthology of 35 very powerful, very personal stories and experiences, including Ferris’ own, that shed a light on this devastating epidemic.
“The intention with this book was and is to save lives, to share our stories. to shout our truths,” writes Amy via Facebook, where her posts are extraordinarily insightful, direct, hilarious and usually laden with multiple uses (often in the same sentence) of the word fuck and its variations. Amy does not hold back anything, which is one of the many reasons I adore and admire her. “We need to end the stigma around depression,” she says. “We need to stop hiding. We’re all so very brave.”
“I look at the folks I know — some very personally, some on the periphery — who have gone through hell and back a million times,” Amy writes in her introductory piece, where she also shares her own story of her suicide attempt, “and they use their life every day to inspire, encourage, and awaken the good and greatness in others because they know what it was like to be flat-out broken, broken into little pieces.”
Shades of Blue is not an easy read, but make no mistake — it’s an important and necessary one. I cannot emphasize this enough. Someone you know needs you to read this book. Maybe that person is you. Someone needs you to share this with someone in your life.
Thirty-five people have courageously shared their most personal stories with the world in Shades of Blue. They are the stories of their own suicide attempts as well as the echoes of people who they’ve loved who took their lives. They are personal battles with addiction, depression, and anxiety.
The only way to review this book, I feel, is to let the essayists’ words do the talking. I think that’s only fair. Yet reading them, they can’t help but feel familiar because they are the words we have either spoken ourselves or the words we have heard from others in our lives.
Barbara Abercrombie “Riding With the Top Down”
“There’s something wrong with me. I thought I’d be an author, live in New York City have outlandish and interesting friends, travel the world, have plenty of money. But I’m facing the truth: I’ve been damaged goods from the day I was born. Whipping myself with my mind like this, I swallow maybe twenty pills … . It’s as though a dam breaks. I burst into tears and cry until dawn. And then I do something I never thought of before: I call the psychiatric clinic at the hospital.”
Marika Rosenthal Delan “Death, Depression, and Other Capital D Words”
“Who wants to die? I wonder if everyone feels like this? It must be normal, right? I tell myself that like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, all of us have been hopeless enough to consider jumping off a bridge. I convince myself it must be a given part of life to contemplate being out of one’s misery. I ruminate on all these things but don’t know if they’re really true. Haven’t we all wondered if life is worth all the trouble? Don’t we all start asking such questions when we reach the ripe old age of ten?”
Beth Bornstein Dunnington “Three Girls, Laughing”
“Because we didn’t want it to be true, didn’t believe it was even a possibility. What did we know in our twenties about that level of despair?”
“…what I take out of that video, out of that day, is that Rena held me up, told me I was it, that I would take the world by storm. Once she was gone, there was no one saying those exact words. No cheerleader saying, ‘Take it, it’s yours.’ There was a quiet space where there had once been so much sound.”
Amy Ferris
“And the truth is, the balls-out truth is this: those of us who suffer from bouts of depression, who don’t believe we’re good enough, who can barely make it out of bed some days, who struggle with self-esteem and the whole concept of self-love …when we use our own pain and suffering so that we can understand another person’s heart … it doesn’t eliminate our pain, or make it vanish, or go pouffff — but it does make it bigger than ourselves; it makes it worth the struggle.”
“Because even in the worst of times there is always something — a memory, albeit, a small teeny memory — that can reel us back in. Back. Home. It takes massive courage to say, ‘I’m not happy.’ To say and declare out loud, ‘Please, help me, hold me.’ It takes huge courage to share our lives — the messy, dirty, crappy, and complicated pieces of our lives.”
Mark S. King “Suicide, A Love Story”
“My prayers to survive the deadliest days, even above the lives of others, were answered with the loss of nearly everyone close to me … . I am often lost at the junction of guilt and gratitude The sorrow visits me without warning. It is the filter through which I see the graveyard, the photos found in a drawer of dear young friends who will not age, the borrowed clothes in my closet that need never be returned. The reminders are hidden bombs, sad remembrances waiting to detonate.”
“How many kinds of pain can we distinguish within our soul?”
Caroline Leavitt “Bye-bye, Crayola”
“Quantum physics says that there is no time, that its man-made, and that everything is happening all at once. I love hearing that. It means in a parallel universe, I can cradle my baby boy. I can kiss my toddler, and hug my grown-up college student. I can bring back those shining moments, and just for a little while, stay in them again.”
Angela M. Giles Patel “Medication Makes Me Whole”
“What is wrong with me is not a bump in the road, or a case of the blues, and it is not something that can be addressed by the right herbal tea. It is not a pothole, it is a fucking canyon — one I can only navigate with help. This is why I have to take two burgundy-colored capsules every morning. If I don’t, my mind turns against me. It’s not that I failed to become enlightened, it’s simply who I am. The kicker is that I am enlightened enough to know that who I am is someone whose mind can fail to be her friend.”
Other authors in this anthology include:
Sherry Amatenstein
Regina Anavy
Chloe Caldwell
Jimmy Camp
Zoe FitzGerald Carter
Debra LoGuerico DeAngelo
Hollye Dexter
Beverly Donofrio
Matt Ebert
Betsy Graziani Fasbinder
Pam L. Houston
David Lacy
Patti Linsky
Karen Lynch
Lira Maywood
C.O. Moed
Mark Morgan
Linda Joy Myers
Christine Kehl O’Hagan
Jennifer Pastiloff
Ruth Pennebaker
Alexa Rosalsky
Elizabeth Rosner
Kathyn Rountree
Kitty Sheehan
Jenna Stone
judywhite
Samantha White
Yet so many remain silent because of the overwhelming stigma surrounding mental health.
What’s even more powerful, though, is sharing our stories of depression, anxiety, and suicide to let others know that they’re not alone.
Robin Williams’ death was the catalyst for author, screenwriter, editor and playwright Amy Ferris “to turn that deep sadness – that deep dark shade of blue – into action.” The result of her efforts is Shades of Blue: Writers on Depression, Suicide and Feeling Blue, an anthology of 35 very powerful, very personal stories and experiences, including Ferris’ own, that shed a light on this devastating epidemic.
“The intention with this book was and is to save lives, to share our stories. to shout our truths,” writes Amy via Facebook, where her posts are extraordinarily insightful, direct, hilarious and usually laden with multiple uses (often in the same sentence) of the word fuck and its variations. Amy does not hold back anything, which is one of the many reasons I adore and admire her. “We need to end the stigma around depression,” she says. “We need to stop hiding. We’re all so very brave.”
“I look at the folks I know — some very personally, some on the periphery — who have gone through hell and back a million times,” Amy writes in her introductory piece, where she also shares her own story of her suicide attempt, “and they use their life every day to inspire, encourage, and awaken the good and greatness in others because they know what it was like to be flat-out broken, broken into little pieces.”
Shades of Blue is not an easy read, but make no mistake — it’s an important and necessary one. I cannot emphasize this enough. Someone you know needs you to read this book. Maybe that person is you. Someone needs you to share this with someone in your life.
Thirty-five people have courageously shared their most personal stories with the world in Shades of Blue. They are the stories of their own suicide attempts as well as the echoes of people who they’ve loved who took their lives. They are personal battles with addiction, depression, and anxiety.
The only way to review this book, I feel, is to let the essayists’ words do the talking. I think that’s only fair. Yet reading them, they can’t help but feel familiar because they are the words we have either spoken ourselves or the words we have heard from others in our lives.
Barbara Abercrombie “Riding With the Top Down”
“There’s something wrong with me. I thought I’d be an author, live in New York City have outlandish and interesting friends, travel the world, have plenty of money. But I’m facing the truth: I’ve been damaged goods from the day I was born. Whipping myself with my mind like this, I swallow maybe twenty pills … . It’s as though a dam breaks. I burst into tears and cry until dawn. And then I do something I never thought of before: I call the psychiatric clinic at the hospital.”
Marika Rosenthal Delan “Death, Depression, and Other Capital D Words”
“Who wants to die? I wonder if everyone feels like this? It must be normal, right? I tell myself that like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, all of us have been hopeless enough to consider jumping off a bridge. I convince myself it must be a given part of life to contemplate being out of one’s misery. I ruminate on all these things but don’t know if they’re really true. Haven’t we all wondered if life is worth all the trouble? Don’t we all start asking such questions when we reach the ripe old age of ten?”
Beth Bornstein Dunnington “Three Girls, Laughing”
“Because we didn’t want it to be true, didn’t believe it was even a possibility. What did we know in our twenties about that level of despair?”
“…what I take out of that video, out of that day, is that Rena held me up, told me I was it, that I would take the world by storm. Once she was gone, there was no one saying those exact words. No cheerleader saying, ‘Take it, it’s yours.’ There was a quiet space where there had once been so much sound.”
Amy Ferris
“And the truth is, the balls-out truth is this: those of us who suffer from bouts of depression, who don’t believe we’re good enough, who can barely make it out of bed some days, who struggle with self-esteem and the whole concept of self-love …when we use our own pain and suffering so that we can understand another person’s heart … it doesn’t eliminate our pain, or make it vanish, or go pouffff — but it does make it bigger than ourselves; it makes it worth the struggle.”
“Because even in the worst of times there is always something — a memory, albeit, a small teeny memory — that can reel us back in. Back. Home. It takes massive courage to say, ‘I’m not happy.’ To say and declare out loud, ‘Please, help me, hold me.’ It takes huge courage to share our lives — the messy, dirty, crappy, and complicated pieces of our lives.”
Mark S. King “Suicide, A Love Story”
“My prayers to survive the deadliest days, even above the lives of others, were answered with the loss of nearly everyone close to me … . I am often lost at the junction of guilt and gratitude The sorrow visits me without warning. It is the filter through which I see the graveyard, the photos found in a drawer of dear young friends who will not age, the borrowed clothes in my closet that need never be returned. The reminders are hidden bombs, sad remembrances waiting to detonate.”
“How many kinds of pain can we distinguish within our soul?”
Caroline Leavitt “Bye-bye, Crayola”
“Quantum physics says that there is no time, that its man-made, and that everything is happening all at once. I love hearing that. It means in a parallel universe, I can cradle my baby boy. I can kiss my toddler, and hug my grown-up college student. I can bring back those shining moments, and just for a little while, stay in them again.”
Angela M. Giles Patel “Medication Makes Me Whole”
“What is wrong with me is not a bump in the road, or a case of the blues, and it is not something that can be addressed by the right herbal tea. It is not a pothole, it is a fucking canyon — one I can only navigate with help. This is why I have to take two burgundy-colored capsules every morning. If I don’t, my mind turns against me. It’s not that I failed to become enlightened, it’s simply who I am. The kicker is that I am enlightened enough to know that who I am is someone whose mind can fail to be her friend.”
Other authors in this anthology include:
Sherry Amatenstein
Regina Anavy
Chloe Caldwell
Jimmy Camp
Zoe FitzGerald Carter
Debra LoGuerico DeAngelo
Hollye Dexter
Beverly Donofrio
Matt Ebert
Betsy Graziani Fasbinder
Pam L. Houston
David Lacy
Patti Linsky
Karen Lynch
Lira Maywood
C.O. Moed
Mark Morgan
Linda Joy Myers
Christine Kehl O’Hagan
Jennifer Pastiloff
Ruth Pennebaker
Alexa Rosalsky
Elizabeth Rosner
Kathyn Rountree
Kitty Sheehan
Jenna Stone
judywhite
Samantha White
sofiaxaguilar's review
4.0
It's hard to review this book because of the amount of writers that contributed to this book, each with their own writing styles and diction, but I have much to say about it. I have never before read a nonfiction book for the pure intention of enjoying it as though it were your normal fiction book. I decided it was finally time to step out of my comfort zone and read a genre that I had previously never thought to expose myself to, and I'm really glad I did.
Shades of Blue is a compilation of thirty-four stories about depression, pain, and the strength to overcome both. When I was asked by my friends why I was reading this book if I didn't have depression, and how I was reading it without becoming depressed myself, I recited to them one of the reviews on the back cover:
"I expected this collection to pull me into a maelstrom of darkness. Instead, story after story, I found myself sufficing into the light of appreciation and hope." -Victoria Zackheim
Reading this book was a constant cycle of interest, sadness, and hope planted in the soil of my heart, and it was unlike any fiction book I was accustomed to reading. For one thing, there was thirty-four different plot lines with thirty-four different protagonists, each unique in their right in terms of experiences, genders, and backgrounds. Also, it's definitely an interesting experience to start and end a new story every few minutes. I truly enjoyed how none of the stories presented the Hollywood-ending of depression where the main character has fully conquered their inner demons and in now living the happily-ever-after life that makes us wonder why that never happens to us. These stories are so much more real and honest, that you can't but help but feel that you as the reader are part of their journey.
One of my favorites is the "Colors at the Piano" by Linda Joy Myers, because through her use of imagery to describe color and sound in new and revolutionary ways, she captured my interest in her real-life journey. Each story managed to help me appreciate my own life, and completely changed how I viewed myself as an adolescent in a fast-paced world where feelings are often pushed aside in search of validation from others that simply aren't worth the time. I was reminded that beneath the pain lies a sliver of hope waiting to be discovered by you, and no matter how cliche that sounds, it's undeniably true. So, to continue to answer the queries of my friends, no, this book did not make me depressed. In fact, it made me that much more hopeful that maybe this life isn't so bad after all.
Shades of Blue is a compilation of thirty-four stories about depression, pain, and the strength to overcome both. When I was asked by my friends why I was reading this book if I didn't have depression, and how I was reading it without becoming depressed myself, I recited to them one of the reviews on the back cover:
"I expected this collection to pull me into a maelstrom of darkness. Instead, story after story, I found myself sufficing into the light of appreciation and hope." -Victoria Zackheim
Reading this book was a constant cycle of interest, sadness, and hope planted in the soil of my heart, and it was unlike any fiction book I was accustomed to reading. For one thing, there was thirty-four different plot lines with thirty-four different protagonists, each unique in their right in terms of experiences, genders, and backgrounds. Also, it's definitely an interesting experience to start and end a new story every few minutes. I truly enjoyed how none of the stories presented the Hollywood-ending of depression where the main character has fully conquered their inner demons and in now living the happily-ever-after life that makes us wonder why that never happens to us. These stories are so much more real and honest, that you can't but help but feel that you as the reader are part of their journey.
One of my favorites is the "Colors at the Piano" by Linda Joy Myers, because through her use of imagery to describe color and sound in new and revolutionary ways, she captured my interest in her real-life journey. Each story managed to help me appreciate my own life, and completely changed how I viewed myself as an adolescent in a fast-paced world where feelings are often pushed aside in search of validation from others that simply aren't worth the time. I was reminded that beneath the pain lies a sliver of hope waiting to be discovered by you, and no matter how cliche that sounds, it's undeniably true. So, to continue to answer the queries of my friends, no, this book did not make me depressed. In fact, it made me that much more hopeful that maybe this life isn't so bad after all.
More...