Brought to you by the Depression Is Real Coalition, The Down & Up Show is dedicated to the reality of depression. Each week our hosts will talk with some of the world's top experts on depression, as well as people who have been impacted by this illness. The reality of depression is that it is a debilitating and potentially deadly medical condition that affects more than 15 million Americans every year. The other reality of depression is that there is hope.

Joshua Wolf Shenk

Joshua Wolf Shenk is the director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College. His first book, Lincoln's Melancholy, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2005, and drew acclaim as a best book of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Shenk has contributed essays to The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times, among other journals, and his articles and reviews have appeared in such places as The New Yorker, GQ, and Time.

Shenk grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, studied history and literature at Harvard College, and began his career as a journalist, writing and editing for magazines like The New Republic and The Economist. He is a recipient of a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship in Mental Health Journalism and a fellowship in non-fiction literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts. You can learn more about his work at www.shenk.net.