A picture book for grownups about depression

Elizabeth Swados has it all. She writes music, plays, and books. She's a musician, director, composer, and teacher. But she also suffers from severe depression. In My Depression: A Picture Book (GN SWA), she uses art to portray the emotional whirlwind of that experience. In doing so, she has managed to produce a book about feeling bad that actually makes you feel good. Her whimsical drawings are also painfully honest about the paranoia, the fears, and the bad behaviors that result from depression. On this page, Swados describes how she sometimes alienates her friends and keeps them at a distance: