It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini

going to, Craig?’which is like the doomsday question because I’m not going to get into a good one.”
    “What would a good one be?”
    “Harvard. Yale. Duh.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “And then the thoughts keep turning and I lie down on my bed and think them. And I used to not be able to lie down anywhere; I used to always be up doing something, but once the Cycling starts I can waste hours, just lying and looking at the ceiling, and time goes slowly and really fast at the same time—and then it’s midnight and I have to go to sleep because no matter what I do, I have to be at school the next day. I can’t let them know what’s happening to me.”
    “Do you have difficulty sleeping?”
    “Sometimes not. When I do it’s bad, though. I lie there thinking about how everything I’ve done is a failure, death and failure, and there’s no hope for me except being homeless, because I’m never going to be able to hold a job because everyone else is so much smarter.”
    “But they’re not all, are they, Craig? Some of them have to be not as smart as you.”
    “Well, those are the ones who I don’t have to worry about! But plenty of people are, and they’re going to kick my ass everywhere. Like my friend Aaron—”
    “Who’s that?”
    “My best friend. He has a girlfriend too, who I’m friends with.”
    “How do you feel about her?”
    “Not so much . . . one way or the other.”
    “Uh-huh.” Dr. Barney wrote on his pad.
    “Anyway . . ."I tried to sum up. I was lying to this guy; that meant we really knew each other. “It’s all about living a sustainable life. I don’t think I’m going to be able to have one.”
    “A sustainable life.”
    “That’s right, with a real job and a real house and everything.”
    “And a family?”
    “Of course! You have to have that. What kind of success are you if you don’t have that?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “So to have that I have to start shaping up now, but I can’t because of this crap that’s going on in my head. And I know that these things I’m thinking don’t make sense and I think ‘Stop!’”
    “But you can’t stop.”
    “I can’t stop.”
    “Well.” He tapped his Prozac pen. “You know that your thoughts aren’t thoughts you want to have. That’s a good thing.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Do you ever hear voices?”
    Uh-oh. Now we were getting into the real meat. Dr. Barney was cuddly enough, but I was sure that if you gave him a straitjacket he’d be able to handle it just fine, coaxing you into it and leading you to a very comfortable room with soft walls and a bench where you could sit looking at a one-way mirror and telling people you were Scrooge McDuck. (How did they make one-way mirrors, anyway?) I knew I had problems, but I also knew I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t schizo. I didn’t hear voices. Well, I heard that one voice, the army guy, but that was my voice, just me trying to motivate myself. I was not going to get thrown in the loony bin.
    “No voices,” I said. Lied, technically. Lied again.
    “Craig, do you know about brain chemistry?”
    I nodded. I’d skipped ahead in the bio textbook.
    “Do you know how depression works?”
    “Yeah.” It was a simple explanation. “You have these chemicals in your brain that carry messages from each brain cell to the next brain cell. They’re called neurotransmitters. And one of them is serotonin.”
    “Excellent.”
    “Which scientists think is the neurotransmitter related to depression … If you have a lack of this chemical in your system, you can start to get depressed.”
    Dr. Barney nodded.
    “Now,” I kept on, “after the serotonin passes a message from one brain cell to the next, it gets sucked back into the first brain cell to be used again. But the problem is sometimes your brain cells do too much sucking"—I chuckled—"and they don’t leave enough serotonin in your system to carry the messages. So they have these drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors that keep your