In her young twenties, writer and activist Eileen Flanagan spent two years teaching English in the country of Botswana, neighboring South Africa and Zimbabwe. She ate, lived, and slept in a 180 square-foot mud hut and was quite content. Then life got a tad more complicated … she married, had kids, and eventually found herself...

“You,” he said, “are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.” That quote belongs in Emilie Autumn’s psychological thriller novel, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls. I used it a few months ago in a post to describe Robin Williams and...

“Holding on to anger,” said the Buddha, “is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” I don’t know about you, but I feel the venom coursing through my veins when I’m ticked off, tightening all my muscles, activating the sympathetic nervous system to prepare for the gorilla that is not about to...

I keep getting the same email over and over again, and my heart aches each time I read it: “I have tried everything to overcome my depression, but nothing has helped. Is there anything else I can do or will I have to live the rest of my life plagued with sadness?” First, hear these...

I’ve always found it curious that more suicides happen in the spring than in any other season. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Center for Health Statistics, suicide rates are lowest in the winter months and highest in the springtime. What’s so bad about April and May? The sun...