Trafford Publishing, 270 pp, $26.50 softcover.

Many contemporary writers have chronicled their ongoing battles with clinical depression. Few have set in print their downward spiral into suicide. Posthumously published, Lara Gilbert's I Might Be Nothing does both. Comprising selected passages from her journals written between the ages of 15 and 22, this powerful and distressing book describes a short lifetime of mental anguish punctured by self-mutilation, substance abuse, sexual dysfunction, and suicide attempts. A brief endnote records her fatal drug overdose while on a weekend pass from the psychiatric ward where she was being treated. She died some six weeks before her 23rd birthday.

Talented, articulate, and thoughtful, Gilbert struggles to understand--and find a cure for--her unremitting pain. Despite her own intelligence and insight, despite talk therapy, hypnotherapy, group therapy, antidepressant medications, electroconvulsive therapy, and repeated hospital admissions, a cure doesn't happen. Her mental torment is unendurable. Again and again throughout her journal, she declares her longing to kill herself.

The daughter of Vancouver artist Carole Itter (who edited the journals) and a here-unnamed poet (from whom Itter separated when Lara was very young but who shared custody of the child), Gilbert was an outstanding student and gifted writer. As recorded in her journals, however, her despair and self-loathing overwhelmed her sense of accomplishment and her determination to excel.

The journal entries initially record what appear to be classic symptoms of clinical depression: insomnia, exhaustion, feelings of guilt and hopelessness, suicidal thoughts, and an early suicide attempt. Later, they describe what looks like posttraumatic stress disorder, including nightmares, flashbacks, and dissociation. Trauma is the key. While relating episodes of self-abasement, including amateur attempts at hooking, heroin use, and sleeping in skid-row doorways, Gilbert eventually alleges that, as a child, she was repeatedly sexually abused. She also records being the adult victim of further sexual assaults (by strangers).

Neither the mental-health system nor the justice system managed to set things right for Lara. Their failures are the subtext to the book and the essential content of its afterword, in which Itter describes her own attempts to understand--to account for and redress--the waste of a brilliant young life.