How can alcohol use contribute to depression?

Perhaps you learned, as I did in high school, that alcohol is a “depressant”. This term is used to describe drugs and other substances that slow brain function and neural activity, but this is generally understood to refer to the short-term effects: relaxation, reduced inhibition, slower thinking, slurred speech, memory loss, etc. I never imagined… Continue reading How can alcohol use contribute to depression?

An Ordinary Disaster

What kid gets that there’s a lesson encoded in every rule? I was no different, and so my confident rule-breaking was also a precocious defiance of all the things that I could have known. I learned most of all to reject what others had built, what they had assumed for me. I got good first… Continue reading An Ordinary Disaster