Jeffery Smith was living in Missoula, Montana, working as a psychiatric case manager, when his own clinical depression began. Eventually, all his prescribed antidepressant medications proved ineffective. Reversing the usual plotline of the modern-day "depression memoir", Where the Roots Reach for Water tells the story of what happened to Smith after he decided to give up his medications and make a life with his illness. Deftly woven into his "personal history" is a "natural history" of melancholia and its ancient links to love and sex, creativity, spirituality, and landscape.