A report from researchers at Duke University sounds an alarm about the anxiety and depression among female undergraduates who aspire to “effortless perfection.” They believe they should display perfect beauty, perfect womanhood, and perfect scholarship all without trying (or at least without appearing to try).

To answer my unsolved questions, as I had done my whole life, I turned to literature. I turned to the women I had long imagined as a council of mothers: Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara. They had advised me, consoled me, sustained me, saved me before. I needed them now more than ever. And, I turned to memoirs of madness.

In his memoir Darkness Visible, William Styron argues that depression, despite the cold, precise terms in which we currently discuss it, is more than anything a disease of disorder and loss of control. He writes that “our perhaps understandable modern need to dull the sawtooth edges of so many of the afflictions we are heir to has led us to banish the harsh old-fashioned words: madhouse, asylum, insanity, melancholia, lunatic, madness. But never let it be doubted that depression, in its extreme form, is madness.

In a highly intelligent and sensitive book, Give Sorrow Words, psychiatrist Dorothy Judd tells the poignant story of Robert, a seven-yearold boy with leukemia, and his two years of painful treatment. In her conclusion she mentions the importance of a medical staff providing clear and honest information, so that people can decide whether agonizing treatment is worth a few more months of life. She also describes how important it is to care for the emotions of patient and family, noting that the ending of a life can be meaningful for everyone involved. Dr. Judd is clearly a doctor of the soul.

Elizabeth Alexander offers an answer in The Trayvon Generation. She describes having frequently visited a conference room at Yale University for over fifteen years as a faculty member and never once noting that the painting at the front of the room of benefactor Elihu Yale, after whom the university is named, included a small brown boy at his feet with an iron collar around his neck linked to a chain. She was shocked by her “delayed comprehension.” “I did my work under the matter-of-fact, unproblematized image of an enslaved brown figure at the foot of the most venerated person in the university’s history.

Think of Tyler showing up to school— possibly prospecting for food in trash cans along the way. He’s undoubtably in a preoccupying state of churn. He knows he might be seen and treated in school based on the poverty and status of his family, on skill and vocabulary deficiencies possibly tied to that poverty, on having a dialect and even clothes that reflect his social status, on not having seen much of the world outside his neighbourhood, and so on.