Maya Hollister Rachel, a 39-year-old self-employed photographer in Asheville, had spent three years cycling through Marketplace plans with rotating networks. Each January she watched her primary care doctor leave the network, her therapist drop out, and her formulary change to substitute generics. By the third year, frustrated and exhausted, she dropped her Marketplace coverage and signed up … Read more
Marcus, a 31-year-old former Army infantry sergeant, walked into a generic sober living house in Tampa, Florida, after 28 days of inpatient rehab and lasted four days. The house was clean, the rules were reasonable, the manager was kind, but Marcus could not sleep. The house had eight men in it, none of whom had … Read more
Marisol Tavares, a 34-year-old graphic designer in Albuquerque, had spent eleven months on a waitlist to see a psychiatrist for her treatment-resistant depression. Her primary care doctor had cycled her through three SSRIs, none of which produced lasting improvement, and the next available board-certified psychiatrist within fifty miles had openings in late October. A friend … Read more
Priya, a 41-year-old software engineer in Austin, Texas, came out of a yearlong depressive episode in 2024 and could not figure out how to feel anything again. Her therapist suggested she walk for an hour each morning and take five photographs on her phone of anything that caught her attention, with one rule: no Instagram, … Read more
Hannah, a 22-year-old graduate student in Boston, started her first semester of a neuroscience PhD program in good health and ended it on a locked psychiatric ward, then a neurology floor, then a neurocritical care unit, with a diagnosis no one in her family had ever heard of. The first symptoms were flu-like and unremarkable: … Read more