Name/Title
A Season in HellEntry/Object ID
2025.007.2Description
In the middle of one night a couple of years ago, Percy Knauth, successful journalist, author, loving husband and father, woke up in a shaking terror and decided to kill himself. This resolve, coming as it did after months of private fears, so relieved him by its promise of an end to his pain that he wept. His weeping woke his sleeping wife and she cradled him in her arms like the baby he had become - and by this act saved his life. But it was a long road back. It had been a long road going, its ultimate destination suicide - and all the more anguishing because he did not realize what was happening to him. You are ill, the doctor he finally saw told him, you have acute clinical depression. He had never heard of the diagnosis and could not have recognized its signs as symptoms. We are all of us, after all, prone to ups and downs of mood and self-confidence; we each have guilts kept private and our own secret knowledge of failures and failed possibilities. This is part of being human. How then could Percy Knauth- or anyone else - read in even a sustained downswing the reality of true and devastating illness? Depression is the most prevalent mental ailment in the country today. What Knauth learned about it, as well as about himself, in the course of his recovery is the substance of this remarkable book. it is only recently that we have learned that depression has physiological as well as psychological roots, and out of this research have come the psychotropic drugs - medicines which repair the imbalance of chemical substances found in the brain of many people afflicted with depression. Help is possible that did not exist a short time ago. Knauth writes of the research into these drugs and of their effectiveness in turning hopelessness into hope. Convinced of this, and in conjunction with psychotherapy, the victim of depression can look forward to being alive once again. A Season in Hell is a moving memoir of one man's odyssey from despair to joy.Collection
Local AuthorsInscription/Signature/Marks
Type
InscriptionLocation
Front right endpaperTranscription
For Betsy and Jim - Who always remind me of what writing really is - and where I came from - and whom I dearly love - Percy Stonington, Feb. 1975Language
EnglishBook Details
Author
Knauth, PercyEdition
FirstPublisher
Harper & RowDate Published
1975Call No.
920 KnauthISBN
0-06-012421-0