Early in her memoir, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me, Anna Mehler Paperny sits wide awake in a dark hospital room following her first suicide attempt. Left alone with nothing but her thoughts, her only refuge is the occasional intercom announcement to break the silence. She finds herself cheering: “Go, sixty-eight-year-old Caucasian man with short brown hair last seen wearing hospital pants and a brown wool cardigan and no shoes! Run!” An escape, if she cannot achieve it herself, she wishes it for others. And so, commences Paperny’s mental battle and her several suicide attempts that follow.

In her first book, Paperny, a Toronto-based award-winning reporter, writes intimately and unabashedly about her fight against depression. As the title suggests, Paperny uses her book to delve deep into her mind to discover how depression manifests itself and how she might recover. However, the book is far from a mere cry for help. Paperny is the heroine of her own story, and she makes it her mission to uncover all she can about this disease in the way she knows best: reporting.

The five-part book begins with her first-person experience with the illness, and invites the reader into the most private spheres of her life; as she sits in bed eavesdropping on two window-cleaners outside her apartment, moments before she swallows a bottle of antidepressants in an attempt to end her life. Yet, for most of the book, the focus is not on Paperny. She not only dives into her own despair but rips the surface off society to expose the hidden layers of depression and suicide that lie beneath. In an impressive expanse of reporting, Paperny spends the next three parts of her story conducting interviews, sharing statistical facts, and revealing the unfortunate history of treatments’ many attempts and failures.

Not only is Paperny trying to find her own cure, but in recognizing that “it’s not just me” she tributes several individuals and families whose lives have been equally affected by this all too common disease. She includes stories like a middle-aged white male who killed himself despite his seemingly perfect life with a large home, successful career, and beautiful family. But Paperny also thoroughly details suicidality within the Canadian Indigenous community (a known fact that is too often ignored). She focuses especially on one adolescent female who lost her life far too soon to suicide, despite her family’s continued efforts to love and keep her safe. Paperny dedicates several chapters to the young people affected by depression, as she explains it is a young person’s disease. The subject matter is so difficult that Paperny’s delicate composure and abundance of empathy helps share her journalistic expertise with all who require more than what the medical industry currently has to offer.

The author meticulously details a variety of medical practices ranging from psychotherapy to an archaic-sounding technique of drilling a hole in your head. However, in considering the option between two research-methods, she weighs in that “I’d choose the latter in a suicidal heartbeat.” She describes how science is still attempting to figure out how the brain functions, and in a comical explanation equates the process to manually rebooting your computer with the help of an IT specialist: Have you tried switching your brain off and back on again? Humour aside, throughout the chapters recounting an abundance of available treatments – depicting more unenticing experiments than I’d care to count – Paperny’s fears and frustrations shine through. In a world with so many options, few more promising than the next, which do we choose? Or, as is the case with Paperny, what happens when the list of options becomes frighteningly shortened as the years pass?

Still, in the sea of multiple accounts, scary techniques, and unnerving therapists, Paperny’s voice is the strongest. In fact, her ambitious analysis is so thorough, that her own presence gets lost about two-thirds through the book. So, I found myself both comforted and relieved when she returns in full force for the final act.

There are so many specialists and uncertainties represented in her book, but the opinion I most trust is Paperny’s. Throughout her examination of techniques, my favourite parts are her frequent asides where she never hesitates to voice her opinion, most often comically. In the aftermath of an attempted suicide, Paperny lays out her humiliation on the table, including getting her period in the crisis ward, and warns the reader “do not, ever, get your period in the crisis ward.” Such “pro-tips,” like the advice to never drink anti-freeze if attempting suicide, has received some negative reviews from critics. However, I argue that she is not just trying to make light of a dark situation, rather, her personality glows. It is as though she takes every opportunity to shout, “I am here!” Paperny loves writing and her family, she is passionate about her career, and hey, she has a sense of humour. The only issue with her life, in her words, is that she wants to die. But depression is not the entirety of her being. Paperny admirably documents the many complexities of suicide, but it is her personal understanding which adds layers to the story. She shows every side of how this disease appears from the outside. What science may still lack in research, the author makes up for with deep insight and compassion.

When hospitalized against her will, and not even allowed to wear her own pants, she equates her level of freedom to an eight-year-old. Trapped within windowless walls and imprisoned inside her own mind with a potential life-long sentence, Paperny explains her state-of-mind: “I wanted to scream and run away, evade my own powerlessness.” The act of writing her memoir not only gives her some agency over a disease outside of her control but in unveiling a failing mental health care system, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me screams out the need for a larger conversation. Paperny undertakes a journey that chooses to face her enemy rather than spend a lifetime trying to run and hide.

Depression isn’t going anywhere and she’s not running anymore. Nor should we.