Jeffrey Swanson, a professor in the Duke School of Medicine’s department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, offers an analogy for perceptions of mental health. “There’s this continuum between night and day, and there’s this moment, dusk, where you can’t really tell the difference between night and day.” Dusk suggests that there is no absolute of either; that it’s a question of degree.

Crystal Collins was nine, and her dad would buy her nice clothes. Crystal’s mother had given her up at birth, and her dad had raised her. He’d always seemed to take good care of her, tending toward overprotectiveness, picking her up from school and being selective about her playmates.

Three Amigos by Taylor Sisk The Plumlee brothers revel in college life—and each other's company.

 Scott Cooper remembers walking into the West Baltimore home, seeing mattresses, four of them, stacked against the living-room wall, and asking the woman if she was moving.

Bill and Angela Lynch wonder whether their son, Matthew, was aware of the university’s veterans’ memorial, which, when Matt was in school here, was inscribed with only the names of Duke alumni who died in World War II. Though it stands along a well-traveled sidewalk in the quad between Duke Chapel and the divinity school, the memorial is a low stone wall and is easy to miss.