Where the Roots Reach for Water: A Personal and Natural History of Melancholia

Winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir

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. Unlike so many personal accounts, Where the Roots Reach for Water tells the story of what happened to Smith after he decided to give them up. Trying to learn how to make a life with his illness, Smith sets out to get at the essence of--using the old term for depression--melancholia.

Deftly woven into his personal history is a natural history of this ancient illness. Drawing on centuries of art, writing and medical treatises, Smith finds ancient links between melancholia and spirituality, love and sex, music and philosophy, gardening, and, importantly, our relationship with landscapes.

Author: Jeffery Smith
Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
Published: 02/15/2001
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.88lbs
Size: 9.08h x 4.93w x 0.75d
ISBN: 9780865475922

Review Citation(s):
New York Review of Books 10/04/2001 pg. 12

About the Author

Jeffery Smith was born in West Virginia and was raised just across the the Ohio River in the Allegheny foothills. He now lives with his wife, Lisa Werner, in Coshocton County, Ohio, where he is working on a book about the traditional music of the Appalachians.

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