A potent cautionary tale about the dangers of psychiatric misdiagnoses and the stigma of mental illness.
A collection of essays about the deleterious effects of a serious medical misdiagnosis.
When she was 18, Sawchyn, a features editor for the Rumpus, ended up in a hospital after her mother found her sitting in her room, “knees pulled into my chest, face pushed into my knees, arms wrapped around myself as far as they would go, rocking forward and back, muttering.” She was diagnosed with bipolar I. This diagnosis, she writes, “would shape the next seven years of my life,” a period during which she “lived afraid of my own mind, both what it was capable of and what others would think and do if they found out about it.” She eventually learned that she had been misdiagnosed, that her teenage “riotous self-will” and capacity for self-harm were attributable to factors that therapy and medication only made worse. In these essays, Sawchyn paints a chilling portrait of her ordeal, her strained relations with members of her biracial family, and similar struggles endured by people close to her, including a boyfriend who made several unsuccessful attempts at suicide and a graduate school classmate with “pale scars tracked up the inside of her left arm that matched those on my right.” The book’s final essays—about a roommate in the Midwest, visits to a Florida goth club, and attempts at religious education—add little to the insights that came before. Yet the author is bracingly honest throughout, as when she writes that, although she’s better now, her urge to self-mutilate remains. “My brain,” she writes, “says that if I tear my flesh, the hurt inside will stop, will mutate into a form I can salve.” Sawchyn’s gift for memorable descriptions makes her ordeal all the more visceral, as when she writes about the effects of Klonopin: “Swallowing [the pills] felt like prescription sunglasses over your whole body.”
A potent cautionary tale about the dangers of psychiatric misdiagnoses and the stigma of mental illness.Pub Date: June 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-941681-66-4
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Burrow Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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