The Cure for Darkness: The Story of Depression and How We Treat It

Riley spent five years reporting this — and it shows. He resists the urge to pick a side in the medication-vs-therapy debate, instead walking through the actual evidence for each major treatment with a journalist's eye for who funded what and which trials replicated.

The book is useful as a baseline for thinking about mental illness as a condition with multiple converging causes — biochemical, social, evolutionary — rather than a single broken neurotransmitter to be fixed. Read alongside Brain Energy for two very different lenses on the same problem.