Summary:
The Scar is a powerful, thoughtful, and
moving book, part memoir about the author’s illness across some 30 years, part
history of depression and its treatment and part essay to evoke cultural and personal values about sickness,
suffering, health, and death. Cregan, a gifted stylist herself, draws on
literature that deals with human suffering, mortality, and wisdom. She frankly describes her sorrows and hopes, the
death of her baby, her attempts to kill herself, and her survival today with
many blessings.
The title
refers to a scar on her neck, a result of her effort to cut her throat with a
piece of glass so that she would die. This attempt, in a hospital, reflects the
depth of her illness and the failure of her caregivers to prevent it. Her book
explores the complexity and variety of mental patients and the range of medical
responses—some useful, some not—to treat
them. Writing as a survivor, she draws on her journal, hospital records,
emails, interviews, and more; she is part journalist, detective, archivist, and
forensic pathologist—as if doing an autopsy on the suicide she attempted.
Ch. 1
What Happened describes the birth and immediate death
of her daughter Anna and her descent into depression and initial
hospitalization.
Ch. 2
What Happened Next discusses mental hospitals and her
perceptions of being a patient in one. A dramatic paragraph describes her
cutting her throat (p. 51).
Ch. 3
How to Save a Life presents electroconvulsive therapy
(ECT), from the jarring images of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to her own
experience of some 17 treatments; she reports that these helped in recovery.
Ch. 4
The Paradise of Bedlams gives a history of mental
hospitals. She is hospitalized three months, “a prisoner,” in her term.
Ch. 5
Where Do the Dead Go? explores the dilemmas of the
living as they mourn the deaths of people they love, including approaches from
Judaism and Christianity. Mary has nightmares about her lost baby. She
discusses Freud, Rilke, T. S. Eliot and others. She buries Anna’s ashes.
Ch. 6
Early Blues discusses modern attempts of science and
the pharmaceutical industry to create drugs for mental illnesses, with influences
from psychodynamic and biological concepts.
Ch. 7
The Promise of Prozac discusses that famous
(notorious?) drug; she takes it on and off while working on her PhD, then other
drugs as they became available.
Ch. 8
No Feeling Is Final sums up many themes. She’s in her late 30s, remarried, and trying
to conceive. After IVF, she’s pregnant. Baby Luke is born. She understands that
the scar on her neck has an analogue with Odysseus’ scar on his leg: a symbol
of survival through hard, even desperate times, for her a “double trauma: the
loss of my child, the loss of myself” (p. 243).
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