Getting old is hard. But sometimes, as the body becomes more vulnerable, the spirit becomes fiercer.

A terrifying journey shows just how much psychotic delusions are embedded in the unquestioned essence of a person’s thinking—as true as ocean, ground, and sky.

The legacies of extraordinary people we’ve lost invite us to embrace the examples they’ve left behind. But how exactly do we do it?

Refusing to be defined by others can sometimes require an unexpected catalyst.

The story of a miscarriage is often about crushed hope, but it can also bring unexpected possibility.

We still don’t have a clear and reliable road map for navigating the unique grief that comes with losing a wanted pregnancy.

How our family lineages weave a connection of giving and taking and giving again.

Our offices don’t make people well, but they extend an invitation. They provide a comforting consistency in the midst of hard, often unsettling work. So a therapist’s office—no matter what it looks like—will absolutely never be “just an office.”

By Martha Manning - My family is haunted by depression. My mother can trace it back in her family at least six generations. When it hits, it hits hard. My own battle with depression has focused on developing an understanding of the commonalities I share with my mother and grandmother, appreciating aspects of our shared legacies as some of the things I most valued in myself. Being haunted is not the same as being cursed.

Confronting grief in a laundromat.

By Martha Manning - My family is haunted by depression. My mother can trace it back in her family at least six generations. When it hits, it hits hard. My own battle with depression has focused on developing an understanding of the commonalities I share with my mother and grandmother, appreciating aspects of our shared legacies as some of the things I most valued in myself. Being haunted is not the same as being cursed.

By Martha Manning - Depression hits you where you live, annihilating even the basic functions, and graduating to the most complex. At its worst, depression extinguishes the pilot light, depriving you of the substrate that makes you feel real.

By Martha Manning - As a psychologist and a mother, I’m haunted by the children of immigrants we’ve all been reading about, stolen from their parents and callously detained. As therapists, we often bear witness to childhood suffering. Our choice of profession deputizes us as agents of change.

A karaoke performance on a psych ward helps a mother and daughter find a way to reconnect.

My family is haunted by depression. My mother can trace it back in her family at least six generations and it's in my father's family, too. When it hits, it hits hard. Understanding the legacy of depression in a family requires more than genetic mapping, family diagrams, or symptom checklists. Each of us is the product of a complex weaving of genes and expectations, biochemistry and family myths, and the configuration of our family's strengths, as well as its vulnerabilities. To truly appreciate the complexity of the weave, we have to sort out the contributions of individual threads to the overall design.