A Nice Place Full of Good People

At twenty-nine years old, still living with his parents and feeling stalled in life, Andrew Rivas grappled daily with escalating depression and panic disorder. Although alcohol muted depression’s taunting voice for a while, on February 18th, 2018, its siren song prevailed with catastrophic results, and he decided to kill himself.

What followed was a seventeen-day stay on the fourteenth floor, the psych ward of one of New York’s teaching hospitals. There, where Beetlejuice played on an endless loop, and discharge, which was dependent on a never-present social worker, was always “several days away,” Rivas was forced to confront his demons.

With the unexpectedly astute wisdom, support, and friendship of the other patients, all enmeshed in their own psychiatric crises, Rivas finds peace, healing, and even laughter in this poignant, insightful, and candidly open memoir about one man’s journey to the edge . . . and back.