This is a relatively heavier (more intense?) book than what I usually tend to cover, so I feel like I need to leave this here:If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts/ideation, do not hesitate to call 1-800-SUICIDE (or your local equivalent if you are outside the United States) or inform your/their doctor. Help is always available and there is always a way out of how you're feeling with proper guidance.
Summary:
Craig Gilner is a 15 year old boy who lives with his family in a middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood. He attends the prestigious Executive Pre-Professional High School, after having studied intensely to get admission. Once admitted, he becomes overwhelmed by the school's intense academic pressure. He feels alienated, and unable to fit in. His stress eventually manifests itself in an eating disorder, distorts his sleep habits, and intensifies his suicidal thoughts. He goes to a psychiatrist who prescribes him Zoloft and is elated for a brief period. He believes he is cured and decides to throw away the medicine. Consequently, his depression builds until, unable to fend off his suicidal ideation, he calls 1-800-SUICIDE and is admitted to a psychiatric hospital. He meets many other patients and is supported and encouraged by his family once they learn of his hospitalization. However, he is still apprehensive about going back to school. Craig meets a female patient, Noelle, who coped with a history of abuse by cutting her face with scissors. In isolation from the outside world, and with help from Noelle, Craig confronts the sources of his anxiety and regains his health. During his recovery, Craig experiments with art and discovers that he has a great deal of natural talent and ability. He realizes his art makes him feel good, and wishes to pursue it. He returns home at the novel's end, with a new energy to live life.
Craig Gilner is a 15 year old boy who lives with his family in a middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood. He attends the prestigious Executive Pre-Professional High School, after having studied intensely to get admission. Once admitted, he becomes overwhelmed by the school's intense academic pressure. He feels alienated, and unable to fit in. His stress eventually manifests itself in an eating disorder, distorts his sleep habits, and intensifies his suicidal thoughts. He goes to a psychiatrist who prescribes him Zoloft and is elated for a brief period. He believes he is cured and decides to throw away the medicine. Consequently, his depression builds until, unable to fend off his suicidal ideation, he calls 1-800-SUICIDE and is admitted to a psychiatric hospital. He meets many other patients and is supported and encouraged by his family once they learn of his hospitalization. However, he is still apprehensive about going back to school. Craig meets a female patient, Noelle, who coped with a history of abuse by cutting her face with scissors. In isolation from the outside world, and with help from Noelle, Craig confronts the sources of his anxiety and regains his health. During his recovery, Craig experiments with art and discovers that he has a great deal of natural talent and ability. He realizes his art makes him feel good, and wishes to pursue it. He returns home at the novel's end, with a new energy to live life.
My thoughts:
There couldn't have been a more perfect time for me to read this book and I'm glad it fell into my lap. For anyone who doesn't actually know me, I'm a high school senior who just applied to college and goes to a semi-competitive (I don't think the school as a whole is super competitive but definitely the people that I interact with on a daily basis are competitive //they're mostly Asians though so I think I brought this on myself). Anyways, my point for anyone younger who's going to be applying to college in a few years, there comes a point where you realize that you are not nearly as smart as you think you are. You've been living all this time in your insulated bubble where you were in the top 10-15% in a grade of about 300-500 and then suddenly you get rejected from your first choice college and you have no idea where you stand. And that's ok. It's heartbreaking. You will cry a lot. It'll be hard to move on for a while. That's alright as long as you get yourself back together and keep on trucking on. I love the setup of this book and the unique situation. Not many people tend to talk about the stress of high school in terms of how it's supposed to set you up for success in college and eventually the "real" world and how distorted our perception of "success" gets when we're surrounded by people whose only goal is to get into an ivy league or in this case the Executive Pre-Professional High School.
Depression among teenagers is a real thing. It's horrifying to realize that you're depressed, to realize that you have no control over how you feel and that you sometimes just can't feel at all. And so you try something, anything, just so you can feel again and that's how people turn to alcohol and drugs. Craig himself doesn't do drugs or drink but his best friend Aaron does to cope with his family situation. He cites being with Aaron as something that alleviates his symptoms a little. I just looked into contact highs and it turns out that very little THC (the thing that gets you high) is exhaled in marijuana smoke so it's almost impossible to get a true contact "high" but the feeling that people have when they're sober but around people who are aggressively smoking is more of a psychological "high" than caused by chemicals. The psychological response lets Craig live a pseudo-normal couple of hours.
Depression among teenagers is a real thing. It's horrifying to realize that you're depressed, to realize that you have no control over how you feel and that you sometimes just can't feel at all. And so you try something, anything, just so you can feel again and that's how people turn to alcohol and drugs. Craig himself doesn't do drugs or drink but his best friend Aaron does to cope with his family situation. He cites being with Aaron as something that alleviates his symptoms a little. I just looked into contact highs and it turns out that very little THC (the thing that gets you high) is exhaled in marijuana smoke so it's almost impossible to get a true contact "high" but the feeling that people have when they're sober but around people who are aggressively smoking is more of a psychological "high" than caused by chemicals. The psychological response lets Craig live a pseudo-normal couple of hours.
Here's a really good quote that resonated with me so much that I started crying because someone finally put it into words: “This was all an excuse, I think. I was doing fine. I had a 93 average and I was holding my head above water. I had good friends and a loving family. And because I needed to be the center of attention, because I needed something more, I ended up here, wallowing in myself, trying to convince everybody around me that I have some kind of. . . disease. I don’t have any disease. I keep pacing. Depression isn’t a disease. It’s a pretext for being a prima donna. Everybody knows that. My friends know it; my principal knows it. The sweating has started again. I can feel the Cycling roaring up in my brain. I haven’t done anything right. What have I done, made a bunch of little pictures? That doesn’t count as anything. I’m finished. My principal just called me and I hung up on him and didn’t call back. I’m finished. I’m expelled. I’m finished.”
From me to whoever's reading this, never ever doubt what you feel because it doesn't fit in some mold of what mental illness "should" look like. Some people throw up a lot when they get sick and others get really high fevers and others just get weak really fast. The same goes for depression and any other mental illness. Not all people with depression have difficulty getting out of bed or difficulty keeping up with schoolwork/jobs/life. Some people, like Craig, are perfectly capable of functioning like "normal" people in their depressed state but feel it even more deeply in every breath they take. They often begin to think that their breaths are stolen air and that they have no actual claim to illness because they don't look depressed and that no one around them suspects that anything is wrong. Also another point: Recovery is not linear. Recovery is wild as all hell and sometimes you feel like you're on that upward trend and you're actively getting better, but sometimes it feels like the world is caving in and that everything's falling apart and you're right back to where you started, but that's a needed part of recovery too. Recovery also doesn't look the same for everyone in terms of trajectory. For some people it does look like regular therapy and medication and trying their hardest to get their life back on track where they left off. For others, it's a healthy change in diet/exercise and making more time for the people they love in their lives because they keep the bad thoughts/feelings away. Whatever recovery looks like for you, it's fine. You will get better. It's just going to take some time. All good things take time. There's hope for you yet! And Happy Reading!
(I know I get really passionate about mental illness but it's something really close to my heart after watching people I know closely suffer in silence. I probably don't know who's reading this, but please take care of yourself!))
