Brought to you by the Depression Is Real Coalition, The Down & Up Show is dedicated to the reality of depression. 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.

Tracy Thompson

Tracy Thompson graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Emory University in 1977 with a bachelor's degree in English literature. From 1981 to 1989, she was a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution, where she covered federal courts. In 1984, she was awarded a fellowship at Yale Law School, where she received an MSL (Master of Studies in Law) degree. In 1987, she wrote a series for the Constitution entitled "Rural Justice," an investigation into racial disparities in sentencing and the breakdown of the public defender system in a rural Georgia judicial circuit. It was a finalist for the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting.

In 1989, Thompson went to work for the Washington Post. In October 1992, she wrote a first-person article for the Post's Health section chronicling her own decades-long battle with depression and a 1990 suicide attempt and psychiatric hospitalization. The article became a book, The Beast, published by G.P. Putnam's Sons in August 1995. In February 1998, she was honored by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill for her "lasting contributions to mental health issues." In April 1999, she won a national reporting award from the National Mental Health Association. Her book has been published in Germany, China and Japan, and has been included in two anthologies, The Healing Circle, published in 1998 by Plume Books, and again in Out of Her Mind: Women Writing on Madness, published by Random House in January 2000.

Thompson left the Post in October 1996 to go on maternity leave, and has been a freelance journalist ever since, as well as an occasional trainer with the Washington-based Committee of Concerned Journalists. Her work has appeared in O, the Oprah Magazine, Redbook, Good Housekeeping and Working Mother.

Her most recent book, The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children and Struggling with Depression, will be published by HarperCollins in August 2006. It is based on a survey of nearly 400 mothers who have suffered from major depression, and incorporates both in-depth interviews with some of those women with her own experience. The survey on which the book is based was created in collaboration with Dr. Sherryl Goodman, professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta.

She lives in the Washington, D.C. suburbs with her husband and two daughters.