I’m not mad. Or am I?

Depression crept up on Andrew Solomon. His life closed in on him: he couldn't eat properly, shower, or talk to friends. Drugs helped, his father helped - but, as his acclaimed new book reveals, there was only one person who could make him feel safe from himself

Get out of that

Psychotherapist Adam Phillips brings out the escape artist in us all in Houdini's Box

Be not idle

Nicholas Lezard finds succour for the soul-sick in Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression, by Lewis Wolpert

Matter of life and death

Julie Myerson takes issue with Tiger's Eye by Inga Clendinnen, another example of the current fad for sick lit

So a fish does need a bicycle

According to a new US bestseller out here soon, there's only one way to keep Mr Right - just don't tell him when he's wrong

A better you?

It's new year, and the shops are full of books promising to transform your life. Laura Barton casts an eye over them

Laugh? I nearly cried

Giles Foden on links between weeping and whooping in Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears and Laughter: A Scientific Investigation

The poetry of mind

Adam Phillips gets Andrew Rissik wondering whether we should read Freud as science or as literature with his collection Promises, Promises

Off their faces

Nicholas Lezard gets high on Mike Jay's Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century

Analyse this

Can you use literature and language to understand the workings of the mind? Adam Phillips appeals for more 'good sentences' in Promises, Promises