SO-CALLED NORMAL

In this debut memoir, a man recounts battling depression and suicidal thoughts throughout his childhood and teenage years.

This book opens with Henick standing on a bridge ready to take his own life. “This is the end,” writes the author. “I’m sure of it. At least, I think I’m sure.” At what seems like the point of no return, the narrative snaps back to Henick’s childhood in an attempt to understand why he felt driven to commit suicide. Growing up in Sydney, Nova Scotia, the author coped with a difficult family life. His parents had separated by the time he was 4 years old. His mother’s new partner, Gary, was a bully who rebuked Henick for playing with a pink stuffed animal: “ ‘Pink is for girls,’ he said. ‘And faggots.’ ” Also bullied at school, the author began to develop anxiety at an early age. At one point, he describes being molested by the son of a family friend. By seventh grade, Henick began making drawings detailing the ways he could kill himself. He recounts periods spent in a “psych ward” and a feeling that “people preferred to medicate my experience away instead of helping me to understand it.” Recalling therapy, he relates a chilling moment when he put a knife to his own throat in front of a counselor. As the author grew older, he embarked on a quest for self-understanding that involved writing articles about mental health while still in school and setting up a charity to raise awareness about the subject. The memoir portrays how he went on to study psychology at a university, marry, start a family, and deliver a TED talk on suicide.

Henick’s harrowing journey from the “scattered stones” of his childhood to what he refers to as finally building a “house on rock” is both inspirational and revealing. The author possesses the rare ability to pinpoint and deftly describe key characteristics that fed his depression: “I was hypersensitive to people’s reactions toward me….I read things into words and behaviours that probably weren’t intended, and I projected my shame and guilt onto the world everywhere I went.” Henick recalls many personal experiences but is always careful to then examine mental illness from a broader perspective, laying bare the characteristics of a disorder like anxiety: “Anxiety is a future thing. It happens when you’re afraid of something that hasn’t happened yet, or may never happen at all.” In doing so, he renders comprehensible some aspects of mental illness that nonsufferers in particular often find difficult to grasp. The author pulls no punches in his writing, which may deter some readers: “I got home from church and tried to hang myself with an extension cord.” But it is this ability to unblinkingly see mental illness for what it is that illuminates a path to healing for Henick. The author’s recollections of his childhood are painstakingly detailed whereas descriptions of adulthood prove less so, making the closing parts of the book feel slightly hurried. For instance, the volume would benefited from a more thorough account of the author’s coming to terms with life as a father. Still, this detracts little from an elegantly written memoir that discovers hope in the darkest of moments.

A candid, graceful, and courageous account that will offer a lifeline to others.