An eye-opening and humane book treatment of a difficult subject.
A Toronto-based Reuters journalist examines her struggles with depression within a larger narrative about mental health and its treatment.
Paperny first tried to kill herself in 2011 by drinking antifreeze. Just 24 years old, the author seemed destined for success. She was writing for the Globe and Mail, her “dream newspaper,” and had the love of a supportive family. However, a profound self-hatred continued to push toward self-annihilation for years after her first attempt. In this multipart memoir/depression exposé, Paperny tells the story of how she fought her way back to functionality while exploring treatment options and the experiences of fellow depression sufferers within the North American mental health system. First—and with a generous dose of sardonic humor—the author traces a journey to (relative) wellness that took her through several hospitals and crisis units. In the second section, she discusses the “fourteen different drugs in dozens of different combinations” she tried to combat her disease, none of which succeeded in completely eradicating her symptoms. She also examines other surgical options, such as electroconvulsive therapy and electrode implantation, and discusses the reasons why pharmaceutical companies have been reluctant to invest more in the development of new depression drugs. In the third part, Paperny explores the stigma associated with depression by presenting stories of men and women from a variety of backgrounds and how that stigma affected their lives. The author also looks at the way the mental health system is biased in favor of white and affluent patients and how rates of suicide have spiked among adolescents in the last decade. Paperny concludes with a brief section about the many troubling legal and ethical questions that can arise—e.g., “deciding when someone’s too crazy to make decisions”—as a result of hospitalization. In this well-researched, engaging, and highly readable text, the author demystifies depression and calls for “compassionate, equitable [and] informed” care for what has become “the most fatal psychiatric phenomenon we’re up against.”
An eye-opening and humane book treatment of a difficult subject.Pub Date: April 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61519-492-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: The Experiment
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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