The volume of yoga practitioners on Martha’s Vineyard is almost overwhelming, yoga teacher Mollie Doyle said this week. “We have an amazing yoga community here . . . there are nine or 10 classes practicing on a Tuesday morning, and they are all full,” she said.

“It’s kind of a yoga mecca.”

And next week, the yoga-friendly Island will be the site of even more asanas and oms than normal at the third annual Martha’s Vineyard Yoga Festival.

We ordinarily associate fire with devastation, a barely controllable force that overtakes everything in its path. The metaphor is used throughout Matthew Heineman and Susan Froemke’s Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare, which screened before a sold-out crowd of over 300 people Wednesday night at the Chilmark Community Center. The showing was followed by two lengthy discussion sessions nearly the duration of the film itself (the documentary is 95 minutes long).

Through conversation and rainy walks around West Chop, Art Buchwald, William Styron and Mike Wallace — dubbed The Blues Brothers — battled depression together.

And then the three men, each luminaries in their field — Mr. Buchwald, a humorist, Mr. Styron, a novelist, and Mr. Wallace, a journalist — took their struggle with mental illness public, using their talents and fame to lessen the stigma of depression and other illnesses.

Robert E. Kinnecom quit drinking 50 years ago. Today, the 81-year-old Oak Bluffs resident is absolutely certain he is alive today because of it and the unlikely help of a few fairly famous Vineyarders.

“My grandfather was a drunk. He was a barber and lost everything he had,” Mr. Kinnecom said.

After reading a recent Gazette about Vineyard House recently, Mr. Kinnecom decided to speak publicly about his personal journey to sobriety.

Islanders seem to voice the complaint nearly as often as they grumble about summer traffic backups at the blinker light and spiking prices at the gas pump:

You can’t find a primary care doctor on the Island.