by Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 9, 2020
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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