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Here is the introduction from the book launch on February 20th. We had around 70 in attendance with lively Q & A and many, many book signings. I am grateful to Scott Sherman and Julie Rothman who generously sponsored the event. And a special thanks to my publisher, Ron Sauder from Secant Publishing.

Welcome, welcome, welcome!

I am overwhelmed by the show of support for this project this evening. My mission here was a daunting one: to share the truth about depression. And to do it in a hopeful way. It is my hope that everyone here will join me in the mission to destigmatize clinical depression.

Everything Slows Down is, as I say in the introduction, a hopeful book. It may not seem that way at first. It takes me through six colleges, five hospitalizations, countless doctors and treatments, including what used to be known as shock therapy -- five decades of major depressive disorder. My struggle, as the subtitle suggests, has been invisible to most folks around me.

The project began on my 65th birthday, when reflecting on all the life that had come before. It may sound incredible, but it was at that point that I fully recognized how much of my life experiences had been colored, if not shaped, by depression.

Kristin, my wife, encouraged me to share my story. But she wisely guided me to write one page at a time. I started getting up early, parking myself in front of the keyboard and cranking out one page. Over time—weeks really—one page became three, which became five, and beyond. Eventually this process produced forty-five pages.

My mother in law—a retired physician and ferocious reader, read my pile of pages and announced, “you have the makings of a book here.” I now had momentum, and I continued over the next year to write, which yielded the 116 pages we now have in book form.

I will read from Everything Slows Down, in a minute. But first a confession. Despite what the marketing materials and Amazon say, this is not my first book. Truthfully, my fourth grade friend, Craig Lord and I starting writing a book on the topic of LOVE. It was inspired by the fact that we were both in love with classmate Ann Clapperton. We would take turns with the manuscript on alternate evenings. After we had about a dozen pages, we had a creative falling out—as so many collaborators do. Craig would not give me back the manuscript, and I can only imagine that was the end right there. But who knows?

For my readings tonight I have chosen three passages. One is heavy, One is, I hope, funny. And the final one is hopeful. So here is Everything Slows Down . . .