In the first pages of In the Jaws of the Black Dogs: A Memoir of Depression, author John Bentley Mays writes, “There are a great many books about depression. This is not one of them. It is pain written, not observed, a testament transcribed from wounded flesh to paper in the clearing, before the black dogs' inevitable return” (p. xii–xiii). The black dogs are the metaphor for chronic depression from which Mays has suffered for most of his life. This brutally honest account illuminates many aspects of his dark disorder.