Maya Hollister 
Priya Ramaswamy did not set out to become a birder. She set out to escape her apartment, which had begun to feel like a slowly closing room after her second miscarriage in fourteen months. A neighbor in her Cambridge, Massachusetts building lent her a pair of beat-up Nikon binoculars and recommended a small park along … Read more
Daniela was thirty-one, an emergency medical technician in Phoenix, when her addiction medicine physician handed her something she had never seen before: a prescription for an app. Not a recommendation, not a suggestion, but an actual prescription written on a pad, transmitted to a specialty pharmacy, and accompanied by a unique access code. The app … Read more
Roland and Adelaide Quintero, a Phoenix couple in their late forties, had spent eight months in what they called couples counseling without making progress on the recurring conflicts that had brought them in. The counselor was warm, asked good questions, and gave each of them equal airtime, but the sessions kept circling the same arguments … Read more
Priya, a 41-year-old marketing director in Austin, was laid off on a Tuesday morning. By Friday she had two letters waiting: a COBRA election notice quoting $1,840 per month for her family of four, and a reminder that her 60-day Marketplace special enrollment window had started ticking. She had been seeing a psychiatrist for treatment-resistant … Read more
Rachel, a 39-year-old self-employed photographer in Asheville, had spent three years cycling through Marketplace plans with rotating networks. Each January she watched her primary care doctor leave the network, her therapist drop out, and her formulary change to substitute generics. By the third year, frustrated and exhausted, she dropped her Marketplace coverage and signed up … Read more
Marcus, a 31-year-old former Army infantry sergeant, walked into a generic sober living house in Tampa, Florida, after 28 days of inpatient rehab and lasted four days. The house was clean, the rules were reasonable, the manager was kind, but Marcus could not sleep. The house had eight men in it, none of whom had … Read more
Marisol Tavares, a 34-year-old graphic designer in Albuquerque, had spent eleven months on a waitlist to see a psychiatrist for her treatment-resistant depression. Her primary care doctor had cycled her through three SSRIs, none of which produced lasting improvement, and the next available board-certified psychiatrist within fifty miles had openings in late October. A friend … Read more
Priya, a 41-year-old software engineer in Austin, Texas, came out of a yearlong depressive episode in 2024 and could not figure out how to feel anything again. Her therapist suggested she walk for an hour each morning and take five photographs on her phone of anything that caught her attention, with one rule: no Instagram, … Read more
Hannah, a 22-year-old graduate student in Boston, started her first semester of a neuroscience PhD program in good health and ended it on a locked psychiatric ward, then a neurology floor, then a neurocritical care unit, with a diagnosis no one in her family had ever heard of. The first symptoms were flu-like and unremarkable: … Read more