Underneath the Lemon Tree: A Memoir of Depression and Recovery - Softcover

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Mark Rice-Oxley is a news editor at the Guardian specialising in foreign news. He was born in Hampshire in 1969, educated at Portsmouth Grammar School, Exeter University and Voronezh University in the USSR. He joined the Guardian after 10 years reporting and writing from Moscow, Paris and Eastern Europe. His journalism has been published in scores of titles worldwide. He lives in Kingston with his wife and three children.

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'I am on a boat on the Thames. There's a dance floor and a bar and my brother-in-law is dressed as James Brown, which doesn't happen every day. I however am having the most frightening time of my life. From under my unconvincing Jimi Hendrix wig I whisper to my mother "Stay close", and grip her hand like it's the first day at school.'

Fearless, sceptical and pragmatic, journalist Mark Rice Oxley was freelancing in Moscow by twenty-three, reporting from Bosnia by thirty. But as he reaches his fortieth birthday the dark virus of depression takes hold and he can barely leave home; he cannot listen to music or read a book; he battles panic attacks, insomnia and suicidal thoughts.A year passes before he begins to understand what has happened to him.

Applying a journalist's eye to his illness, Rice Oxley charts depression's vicious circles of despair, resignation and hope, and reports on the treatments available - from meditation to drugs to cognitive mindfulness therapy.Talking to psychotherapists, friends and fellow sufferers; he unsparingly examines his own life for causes and with bleak honesty catalogues the terrible effects of depression on work, family and love.

Stark, humorous and consistently intelligent, Is That All There Is? is a remarkable report from the frontline of depression: an answer to a devastating modern epidemic it offers not a cure but a courageous call for compassion and hope.