Reader's Review: "But I'm Not Depressed" by Lia Rees

Synopsis from Amazon:

Lia was a high-performing student at college in Nottingham when a random incident plunged her into a distorted, chaotic new world. Her thoughts and senses could no longer be trusted, and her intellect was gone. She found herself unemployable, drifting through life.

The lab tests, blood-work and scans found nothing, so she was given a wastebasket diagnosis: depression. Psychologists tried to manipulate her out of the “negative thinking” behind the symptoms. What negative thinking? she wondered.

Lia had to find out the truth, because nobody else would do it for her.

But I’m Not Depressed is the bleak but hopeful tale of an individual finding her way through adversity. It offers personal insight into the surreal experience of neurological dysfunction, and a spirited defense of medicine in the face of a modern cult of psychobabble.

“If I gave up searching for a cure, I would never be able to prove them wrong.”

>>>>>>>>>>

My Review:

I'll be honest, I don't read much nonfiction. It's not eye-catching or fast-paced at all, and there aren’t really created characters, a clever premise, or manufactured conflict. It took me several months to finish this book, but I am glad I did!

While there cannot be much said for how much a memoir like this "excites the imagination" the way a good fictional adventure does, the writing is no less important to consider, because if the voice is too dry, too self-absorbed, too scattered and disorganized, the reader is lost and interest wanes.
Rees describes her journey through the deterioration of her mental health, the struggles with improper diagnoses, and everything in between. She details the trauma of realizing went wrong after a "standard" medical procedure... and the subsequent search for answers, entrusting her care to professionals and experts, only to have that trust strained as the best advice she could find was not enough, or outright wrong.

If there is something I resonate with, it’s the labyrinthine complexity of the human body—how many advances medicine has made, and yet still so much we do not know. Particularly about the brain. Those who have been following my blog since the beginning know that I am no stranger to brain issues, misdiagnoses, and the disparity between what we know about the brain and how it works. The difference is that mine is largely an anatomical issue (the way my brain formed) whereas Rees had struggles more with the way her brain functioned after a near-fatal reaction of some kind. (Once again, there are hypotheses, conjectures, and inferences, but too many factors to be absolutely certain)
She outlines the fear, the pain, and the frustration of her whole experience. She finds words to describe the forgetting, the not-even-realizing-you-ever-knew, the daily rediscovery of things one encountered every day. And yet—in between the metaphors and succinct phrases is the true substance of irretrievable memories. Her words dance around the particular thing she is describing, whether a thought process or a particular experience she might have had at one point… But after all, it’s merely the outline, the echo of what once was, and the reader feels it keenly. If the brain sloughs the information off so that it cannot ever be recovered—is it still a memory? How can one thrive if the brain struggles with new stimuli every day?

And yet, she does. Rees finds a place where she can have a voice and be heard, and she steps up to advocate for others who have not come through everything as far as she has. It’s not the sort of life we’d expect someone her age to have, and it’s not quite the life she wanted for herself—but Rees displays tenacity in her perseverance, and every day is a new milestone, with new opportunities to move forward. She is injured, disintegrated, beleaguered--but she is not depressed. If anything, a reader can come away from reading her story with the realization that "depression" is an indefinite term, and that it is possible to be hurt and diminished, but also still retain the capacity for hope, and the ability to find joy and passion, and sometimes, the wherewithal to work around the malfunctions. It speaks volumes to the brain's ability to find ways of compensating for its own shortcomings.

I'd say But I'm Not Depressed earns a solid ****3.5 STAR**** rating. It is excellent for those who are interested in neuropsychology, those who have or know others who have some kind of traumatic brain injury, or those who would like to dig deeper into the topic of mental health. Rees does an excellent job of conveying her experience, and it could be worth our while to listen.