"Jeffery Smith was living in Missoula, Montana, and was into his eighth year as a psychiatric case manager when his own struggles with clinical depression began. Eventually, all his prescribed antidepressant medications proved ineffective. Unlike many such personal accounts, Where the Roots Reach for Water describes what happened after Smith decided to give them up.

Trying to learn how to make a life with his illness, Smith sets out to get at the essence of - using the old term for depression - melancholia."--BOOK JACKET.

"What he learns utterly transforms his life. Deftly woven into his "personal history" is a "natural history" of this ancient illness - a natural history that surveys, as we might expect, recent neurobiological research and speculation about depression's evolutionary purpose. But Smith also draws on centuries of art, writing, and medical treatises inspired by the illness and its very near kin, the melancholic temperament.

His imaginative natural history of melancholia touches on mythology, anthropology, religious history, love and sex, philosophy, and our relationship with landscapes."--BOOK JACKET.