What I loved about Twitter was that it was a weird place where you could become friends with, like, this bat avatar, or a moose on rollerskates. Last Thursday, I took him to the vet for what I thought was a pulled muscle or tendon, and got the really bad news. This can be as simple as emptying the dishwasher, rearranging your closet, going for a walk, talking to a friend, or getting on with a work project. If you clip a couple of coupons, find a deal online for something you need, or take back those shoes you thought you wanted but will never wear, you make yourself a little more financially secure. Non-chemical causes of depressions include childhood trauma and the cumulative effect of negative ruminations.

So Sad Today: personal essays Paperback – 12 May 2016 So Sad Today: personal essays Paperback – 12 May 2016

After all, essays about how people are anxious and depressed but working on it in therapy are ten-a-penny; an essay about wanking yourself into a stupor over vomitonline. If your mindset is causing you to overlook what you do have and what you can have, it’s time to change it.

You may go through all your coping skills for sadness, and it may still be there if it’s depression. Broder employs precise and provoking language to entice readers with essays that explore the all-consuming nature of technology, romance and relationships in the modern world. When sadness tints every aspect of your day-to-day an unrelenting gray, you might have trouble finding relief. With courage and humor, Broder shows us that the underbelly of self-awareness is the existential sads.

So Sad Today’s Melissa Broder: ‘I just want to rip that

The essays made me think affectionately of Olivia Laing's The Lonely City, another book about depression, but one in which the author's feelings are refracted productively through art works and biographical sketches, making it feel generous and outward-looking. She is brilliantly talented and has exhibited some eccentric behaviour over the years, including a few rather public breakdowns. Now you’ve got a public persona that centres on anxiety and depression, do you think that might make it harder to distance yourself from these feelings? After writing each chapter, she would edit it hard, sentence by sentence, in the hope that each section “would be a diamond”.At first, I put at least some of this down to generational differences, but the more the book went on, the less convinced I was that she is actually any younger than me. But I never tweet about him and there’s only one essay about him in the book, and I got his permission to do that.