A humorous account of a New York City teenager's battle with depression and his time spent in a psychiatric hospital

When her father leaves for a job out of town, Mazzy is left at home to try to cope with her mother, who has been severely depressed since the death of Mazzy's baby sister

Seventeen-year-old Ocean Wu moves to New York City to start college, but she defers her enrollment, keeping it a secret from her immigrant mother, and instead uses the time to deal with her ambivalence about her place in the world.

Jam Gallahue, fifteen, unable to cope with the loss of her boyfriend Reeve, is sent to a therapeutic boarding school in Vermont, where a journal-writing assignment for an exclusive, mysterious English class transports her to the magical realm of Belzhar, where she and Reeve can be together.

Morgan can't count the number of times she's been the only non-white person at the sleepover, been teased for her "weird" outfits, and been told she's not "really" black. She's spent most of her summer crying in bed; it feels like the whole world is listening to the same terrible track on repeat, and Morgan sees life as a never-ending hamster wheel of agony. She knows why she's in therapy. When Morgan makes friends with fellow outcasts, blasts music...

Clinically-depressed Darius Kellner, a high school sophomore, travels to Iran to meet his grandparents, but it is their next-door neighbor, Sohrab, who changes his life. "Darius Kellner speaks better Klingon than Farsi, and he knows more about Hobbit social cues than Persian ones. He's a Fractional Persian -- half, his mom's side -- and his first ever trip to Iran is about to change his life. Darius has never really fit in at home, and he's sure...

After her fiancé's brother convinces him to break up with her before the wedding, Athena Greydon moves into a ten-foot-wide Spite House between the two and engages in some well-deserved payback. When Athena Greydon's fiancé ends their engagement, she has no choice but to move into the Spite House she recklessly bought him as a wedding gift. This is a problem, for several reasons: The house, originally built as a brick middle finger to the neighbors,...

During the years he spends in a neural health facility, Pat Peoples formulates a theory about silver linings: he believes his life is a movie produced by God, his mission is to become physically fit and emotionally supportive, and his happy ending will be the return of his estranged wife, Nikki. When Pat goes to live with his parents, everything seems changed: no one will talk to him about Nikki; his old friends are saddled with families; the Philadelphia...

When Victoria Cruz wakes up in the psychiatric ward of a Texas hospital after her failed suicide attempt, she still has no desire to live, but as the weeks pass, and she meets Dr. Desai and three of the other patients, she begins to reflect on the reasons why she feels like a loser compared with the rest of her family, and to see a path ahead where she can make a life of her own.

Julia Daniel doesn't really feel at home anywhere. Her life in L.A. is lonely, and her career as a food stylist for a struggling gourmet magazine falls well short of her deisre to be a photographer. Although she liked growing up in Kentucky, ever since her mother's death and her father's remarriage, her birthplace hasnt' felt like the right fit. But after the tragic deaths of her father and stepmother in a plane crash, Julia's true odyssey begins....