Amanda Cote

Amanda Jean Cote of Salem, New Hampshire graduated from UNH Manchester in December 2016 with a bachelor of arts, magna cum laude, in communication arts. Although Amanda’s project started as a requirement for a course, she was inspired by her professor, Barbara Jago, and soon found that she “wanted to write, more than anything” to help make sense of her depression. Amanda found that writing about her experience with depression was healing and gave her “an entirely new perspective on many things.” To fulfill her coursework requirement, Amanda wrote an 8000-word autoethnography. Here, in her Inquiry article, she describes the research process she took to complete that larger body of writing. Amanda believes that writing her story has left her at peace, and shares her stories “in the hopes that they will help someone the way that they helped me.”