My daughter comes to me in the early evening, when the summer sun is still elevated and the azaleas flourish in a profusion of fuchsia outside the kitchen door.
'I need to speak to you,' she says. 'Will you come to my room?'
They are interminable, the minutes that follow. Long, slow-motion minutes which transform the trivial concerns of the day – a looming deadline, uncooked dinner – into something far graver: please – please – don’t let her be pregnant, I think.
I follow my daughter into her bedroom, sit down beside her. She looks me in the eye, gathers herself and draws a breath. 'I think I’m depressed,' she says.
Bewilderment and relief sweep over me all at once: my daughter is not pregnant, she is not addicted to drugs, she is not in trouble with the law. Instead, she is depressed and, superficially at least, this does not come as too great a surprise.
Now that she has put a name to this pall that hangs over her, certain things come into focus, things I must surely have sensed but which were blurred, lacking in clarity: the dark rings beneath her eyes, the melancholy swimming within them, the empty space where joie de vivre once lived.
But I am riven with alarm, too. My daughter is 16 years old and embarking on her final year of high school. She is young, beautiful and confident. She has a boyfriend and plans that would break an older person’s heart: study, parties, travel. It blindsides me, this news that she is afflicted by an illness that will sap her of the joy and optimism on which I have tried to raise her, an illness which threatens to snatch away her spirit just as she blossoms into adulthood.
The next day we sit in the consulting rooms of my doctor. This is where we will begin, I tell my daughter. She is disarmingly cognisant, given the circumstances. She has consulted the Internet, drawn up a list of her symptoms, armed herself with questions, and is ready to tackle this problem. If anyone is swimming blindly in this sudden, unanticipated quagmire, it is me.
'This happens sometimes, to teenagers,' the doctor says, sliding a packet of Zoloft across her desk. 'There’s no knowing why such chemical imbalances occur.'
The doctor can't tell how long this treatment will last. 'Possibly for life,' she says with a shrug. My daughter sits beside me;