Daphne Merkin has been hospitalized three times. Recounting this series of hospitalizations, as well as her visits to myriad therapists and psychopharmacologists, Merkin fearlessly offers what the child psychiatrist Harold Koplewicz calls "the inside view of navigating a chronic psychiatric illness to a realistic outcome." "The opposite of depression," she writes with characteristic insight, "is not a state of unimaginable happiness . . . but a state of relative all-right-ness."