RABBIT HOLE

A blend of personal narrative and journalistic investigation, RABBIT HOLE is an exploration of mental health; the drugs that we as a society use to try to heal, and the ways both traditional and nontraditional that may actually help. This is Prozac Nation meets How to Do Nothing.

Struggling to end a year-long mental breakdown, sometimes on the brink of suicide, P.E. Moskowitz turned to psychopharmaceuticals. They joined the 40 million Americans prescribed medication for mental health issues, mostly by primary care physicians with little to no mental health training. It was the beginning of a personal reckoning with the roles that drugs play in society, and a journey of healing, in which they finally took control of their own treatment.

In their journey from despair to a semblance of stability, purpose and hope, Moskowitz visits a ketamine clinic, embeds with opioid users and American high school Adderall poppers, and unearths a hidden world of medical research and history. They become increasingly skeptical of overused medical solutions to common mental health problems. Without denying the positive effects of medication on many lives, including their own, Moskowitz objects to the isolating tendencies of diagnosis: locating problems within the patient's chemistry obscures the real-world stressors of an increasingly precarious society that values productivity over human complexity.

A braided work of memoir, history, research, theory and cross-country reportage, RABBIT HOLE is, at its core, a riotous, rigorous, and taboo-shattering journey of hope and transformation, grounded in research and personal experimentation. Drawing on their own experience of gender transition, Moskowitz draws comparisons to the "hatching" that each of us must undergo to discover the possibilities of collective action that might be needed to rebuild our society while rebuilding ourselves.

P.E. Moskowitz (they/them) is the author of How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality and the Fight for the Neighborhood (Bold Type, 2017) and The Case Against Free Speech: The First Amendment, Fascism, and the Future of Dissent (Bold Type, 2019). Moskowitz's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in New York Magazine, the Atlantic, GQ, The Nation, Mother Jones, WIRED, BuzzFeed, Slate and VICE. Moskowitz writes a bimonthly column in Business Insider about politics, the media and mental health and runs a successful newsletter on Substack called Mental Hellth which has a dedicated fan base of thousands of subscribers.