Breaking Awake

'An unflinching examination of contemporary culture's quest for the quick fix to emotional pain' LAURA DELANO

Why do so many of us need drugs to make it through the day? What is wrong with us?

In August 2017 a car ploughed into a crowd of peaceful marchers. For P.E. Moskowitz, this was a shattering near-death experience, followed by a nervous breakdown. As they willed themselves back to life using a variety of drugs, both prescription and illegal, they started to wonder: why do we need drugs to quell the pain of modern life?

In Breaking Awake, Moskowitz takes us on a kaleidoscopic voyage through the twenty-first century's mental health crisis and the drugs we take – from fentanyl to SSRIs, from ketamine to LSD and beyond – to cope with the gnawing bleakness of our present moment. We meet a team handing out free heroin on the streets of Vancouver and a young mother in Chicago who has been on SSRIs since childhood, ravers in Brooklyn taking drugs to push the limits of human consciousness and ordinary people leading ordinary lives on a constant cocktail of medication.

Searching for answers to find a path to healing, Moskowitz asks: do drugs spark liberation or simply numb our modern malaise?

About the Author

P.E. Moskowitz is a writer born and raised in New York City. Their writing has appeared in New York magazine, GQ, The Nation, and many other places. They run a popular Substack newsletter about psychology, psychiatry and culture called Mental Hellth. When they’re not writing, they’re probably playing tennis, chilling with friends across the city, or watching the Mets lose again.