On the last day of 1985, I went home to live in Bunyah, the farming valley I had left some twenty-nine years earlier. My wife and our younger children followed two days later … at last I was going home, to care for my father in his old age and to live in the place from which I'd always felt displaced. What I didn't know was that I was heading home in order to go mad.

Killing the Black Dog is Les Murray's frank and courageous account of his struggle with depression. Since this essay first appeared, hosts of readers have drawn insight from his account of the disease, its social effects and its origins in his family's history. Murray describes how patches of daylight now balance out those of darkness in his life.