An intense, moving account of raising and mourning a child with mental illness.
In her debut memoir, Meadows memorializes her daughter while deploring the state of adolescent mental health care.
Karen and Dennis were ecstatic to adopt infant Sadie. She grew into an outgoing, adventurous child who embraced life, whether that meant fishing with her grandfather or starting a neighborhood dog-washing business. But bouts of crying, anxiety, and overeating became regular occurrences in Sadie’s life when she started middle school, and a psychiatrist eventually diagnosed her with dysthymia, a chronic depressive disorder. Medication failed to help Sadie, and she made her first suicide attempt in seventh grade. A short stay in a psychiatric ward was followed by more attempts and a longer stay in a residential facility. The family moved to Portland, Oregon, where Sadie’s new psychiatrist prescribed an ever changing drug cocktail as Sadie joined the city’s street culture and began skipping school, avoiding home, and admitting herself to the ER. The Meadowses eventually found what they hoped was a true solution: several months of treatment in a wilderness program followed by over a year in a rural emotional-growth high school. Sadie’s stability issues continued in Portland, however, and at age 18, she died after a suicide attempt. Meadows emphasizes that the tragedy of Sadie’s situation was not just her illness, but how her illness obscured a vivacious and complete human being. She writes compellingly about the constant obstacles facing Sadie, herself, and Dennis: a dearth of child and adolescent psychiatrists, lack of “wrap-around” services, and, perhaps most significantly, the stigma that prevents families from seeking help or comfort. The book’s power comes from the way Meadows lucidly analyzes her own story to identify larger systematic issues in mental health care for young people. The memoir also includes basic advice and resources for struggling teens and their families.
An intense, moving account of raising and mourning a child with mental illness.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63152-137-9
Page Count: 280
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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