★Simplified Chinese rights and Complex Chinese rights have been sold!
★Recommended by South Korea’s authoritative media like Korea Daily News, Shinhyang News, The Hankyoreh, JoongAng Ilbo Sunday
★Selected as the "First Book of Autumn" at the 2021 Seoul International Book Fair
★On the list of “Book Recommendations from the Editor-in-Chief” in Kyoho Bunko, the largest bookstore in South Korea
★Top 5 bestseller in Books for Women and Top 20 in Humanities and Social Sciences in YES24, a representative online bookstore in South Korea
★Top 83 bestseller in Humanities and Social Sciences in Aladdin, a well-known bookshop in South Korea
★This book does not simply view depression as a disease or any other stereotypes forced upon it. Instead, it provides the most intense and intimate exploration of depression. The author demonstrates restless and melancholy moments of women in their 20s and 30s to rewrite “depression.”

South Korea had the highest suicide rate among OECD countries from 2003 to 2020, except 2017. "Depression," the main reason for these suicides, has long been referred to as a social problem. Recently, the media has focused on the phenomenon that an increasing number of women in their 20s and 30s are diagnosed with mental illness, and that the suicide rate of women in their 20s has risen.

As more and more people in modern society go to psychiatry, publishers choose to publish more notes or articles written by patients with depression or other mental illness. Authors of relevant books on the market put forward nontraditional views about mental disorders and share their own experience. Their main idea is that we should not aim to eliminate or deny mental illness; instead, we should view them as a part of life and use a positive attitude to live with them.

The author Shamina notices some problems with this trend. All disease-related narratives are valuable, but they might be treated as personal experiences. Once so, it is difficult for people to observe the social and historical context surrounding depression. When considered a personal affliction, depression could only be viewed as the result of specific individuals' life environments and characteristics.

Why are women in their 20s and 30s depressed? As a patient diagnosed with "bipolar disorder" (manic depression) herself, the author collected the stories of depressed women in their 20s to 30s to directly answer questions about depression. During the diagnosis and treatment of her bipolar disorder, Shamina realized that mental illness was not a personal problem. She had uncomfortable experiences in psychiatry. She often felt angry, powerless, and melancholy after fighting violence against women in "FemiDangDang," a women's movement group. Her master's thesis was on "Depression Measurement Tool." In this book, her psychiatric knowledge is combined with the intimate stories she gained from deep in-person communication with 31 interviewees. It took her 2 years to compile these experiences into a book.

"Crazy, Weird, Proud, Smart Women" uses patients' language to redefine the pain brought by "depression". Restoring scattered pieces of melancholy into a shared experience, the author not only makes this book a social platform for openly discussing depression, but proposes more equal ways to interpret depression.

American poet and essayist Ann Boyle said, "The history of disease is not the history of medicine, but the history of the world." Shamina writes a new account of women's suffering history on the other side of medical disease and social imprinting. This intense and thought-provoking book is written to vividly show women's history of pain and violence. As Kim Hee-kyung recommends, "This book will be the starting point of changes in how we understand pain."

About the author
Shamina (transliteration)
Born in 1991, non-fiction writer.
To study philosophy of science, Shamina studied earth environmental science and philosophy for her undergraduate courses. She changed her direction to the history of science after entering the Graduate School of the History of Science and Philosophy of Science Cooperative Program. During the same period, the 2016 Gangnam Station Femicide happened and then she officially started working as an activist in the women's movement group "FemiDangDang." At the same time, she also suffered from worsening depression and wrote her master's thesis on this disease. Then, she escaped from graduate school. To make a living, she worked in various occupations such as columnist, science reporter, and writing teacher. Determined to become a writer, she contributed her articles to various media such as Current Affairs IN, Korean People 21, and Korea Daily News. "Crazy, Weird, Proud, Smart Women" is the first book to bring together her research, observations, and distress during this time.