After a Doctor Asked "How Are You Alive?", Scott Nelowet Turned the Answer Into a Book for the 51 Million Americans Living With Depression

How Are You Alive? offers depressed readers a voice they can hear, practical tools for getting through today, real direction toward ending their depression, and help building a life once it's gone.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Aug. 4, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Depression is rising sharply in the United States. Gallup's National Health and Well-Being Index found that 19.1% of American adults reported currently having or being treated for depression in early 2026, an estimated 51 million adults. The World Health Organization puts the global figure at roughly 332 million people.

Behind every statistic is someone trying to work, love, and survive another day against an illness that can make all three feel impossible. Scott Nelowet was one of them for nearly fifty years.

At 56, a neuropsychiatrist reviewed Nelowet's history of treatment-resistant major depression, decades of failed medications and treatments, and asked: "How are you alive?"

Nelowet had an answer. He didn't have a short one. That answer became How Are You Alive?, releasing today, August 4, in Kindle and paperback editions.

The book is a practical guide written directly to people still inside their depression, built around four things Nelowet believes they need most.

A voice that actually understands. Most advice given to depressed people gets twisted by depression into more evidence against them. "Depression will take almost anything you say and turn it into evidence against the person suffering," Nelowet writes. "Tell them they should be grateful, and depression tells them they are terrible for not being grateful enough." Having lived inside that logic for most of his life, he writes in a language depressed readers recognize rather than resist.

Tools for surviving today. Long-term solutions are hard to pursue when someone is fighting to get through the next hour. Nelowet calls his techniques "Quick Pops," small, doable actions for interrupting a destructive thought loop. "A person who is drowning does not need a lecture on the physics of water," he writes. "They need something they can grab."

A real path toward ending it. Nelowet rejects the idea that a failed medication or therapist means someone is untreatable. He tried therapy, eight different antidepressants, meditation, and eventually ketamine and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, the combination that finally ended his depression in 2024. As he puts it in the book, "Depression lies. It keeps lying until we make it the truth."

Help building a life afterward. Ending depression doesn't erase the habits, fears, and damage it leaves behind. The book's final section addresses relearning how to trust relationships, feel emotions, and build an identity that isn't organized around survival. "Getting rid of depression gave me the rest of my life," Nelowet writes. "It did not hand me instructions for what to do with it."

To anyone still in it, he offers this directly: "One day, someone just like you will wonder why they should go on, and you might be the only person who can save their life."

How Are You Alive? releases August 4, 2026, in Kindle and paperback on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H34L5V7G

About Scott Nelowet

Scott Nelowet is an author, entrepreneur, and former Peace Corps volunteer, now working as a consultant for Peterbrooke Chocolatier and Fade 'Em All Barbershops. He also wrote French Fry Heaven, the first book in the Peace Strain Series for young adults. The series' second installment, Peace Frog, releases November 3, 2026. He lives in Jacksonville, Florida, with his wife, Jennifer.

Media Contact

Scott Nelowet Jacksonville, Florida, [email protected], (904) 945-9054

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