Showing 1 - 10 of 32 annotations contributed by Glass, Guy

The Best Minds

Rosen, Jonathan

Last Updated: Jun-26-2023
Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Biography

Summary:

The Best Minds is the true story of the lifelong friendship between the author, Jonathan Rosen, and Michael Laudor.  To an extent, as children and young adults, Rosen lives in his brilliant friend’s shadow.  While both attend Yale, it is Laudor who graduates summa cum laude in three years.  Laudor applies and is admitted to all the top law schools, and, at twenty-four, seems to be destined for great things.  Then, a switch flips. His parents have been replaced by Nazis, or so he claims.  He roams the house with a kitchen knife.  His mother locks herself in the bathroom and calls the police.  Rosen gets a call.  His friend is in a psychiatric hospital. He has been diagnosed with Paranoid Schizophrenia.  

After being stabilized on antipsychotics, Laudor is discharged to a halfway house and begins to attend a day hospital.  “Painfully aware of where he had been and where he ought to be” (p.243), he is advised to get a job as a cashier at Macy’s. Instead, he makes the extraordinary decision to matriculate at Yale Law School, whose acceptance he has deferred. At school, he wakes up every morning believing his room is on fire, “paralyzed with fear until his father called and told him the flames weren’t real” (p.277). Incredibly, with the encouragement of the dean and faculty, who “create a day hospital” (p.262) for Laudor and his classmates who read, edit, and type his work, he manages to graduate.   

Laudor looks for a job, but determined to be open about his illness, seems unemployable. Nevertheless, he is in a unique position to be a powerful advocate.  He is interviewed by the New York Times and is portrayed in glowing terms in a widely circulated article. There are bidding wars among several publishers for a book he is to write.  Leonardo DiCaprio expresses interest in playing him in a film. He receives a large advance which obviates the need for employment. For the director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) this is the perfect “opportunity to give the world a positive image of someone with serious mental illness” (p.406).   

Unfortunately, Laudor is not compliant with his medication.  His personal care and his thought processes deteriorate. However, since he knows how to “avoid the buzzwords that could trip a psychiatric alarm” (p.423) he evades treatment. Eventually he spirals into full-blown psychosis, and convinced his fiancée has been replaced by a wind-up doll, he stabs her to death.

Laudor is considered unfit to stand trial and is committed to a forensic psychiatric facility.  His book is never written, and the film director who was to tell his story instead makes A Beautiful Mind, which wins many awards.  After years of estrangement, Jonathan Rosen begins to visit his childhood friend again.  Laudor remains institutionalized to the present day. 

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The Doctor

Icke, Robert

Last Updated: Feb-28-2023
Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Plays

Genre: Play

Summary:

The Doctor is a new play that was “very freely adapted” from a work by 19th-century Viennese doctor/playwright Arthur Schnitzler.  The author, Robert Icke, is an English playwright and director who is especially known for his reworkings of classics.  

The doctor to whom the title refers is Ruth Wolff, the renowned and rather formidable director of a private medical institute.  We learn that we are in the present day, and Dr Wolff is Jewish.  At the play’s outset, the organization is attempting to secure funding for a new building, and a new head of pharmacology is about to be chosen.  One of Dr. Wolff’s patients, a 14-year-old girl, is in sepsis following a self-induced abortion.  Her health rapidly declines.  When it becomes clear the patient is not going to make it, her parents send a Catholic priest to the hospital.  Dr. Wolff prevents the priest from entering the room to administer the last rites.  

Dr. Wolff’s actions set off a chain of events.  Her confrontation with the priest goes viral on social media, resulting in a public relations nightmare for the hospital.  In her characteristically uncompromising way, when asked to smooth things over, the doctor responds: “I think the lack of my having done something makes that really quite difficult” (p.31).  She is labelled anti-Catholic and her car is painted with a swastika.  Her choice for head of pharmacology, also Jewish, is deliberately rejected by the board in favor of a Catholic.  The funding for the institute’s new building is suddenly in doubt as a formal inquiry is opened by the Minister for Health. Disgraced, Dr. Wolff is forced to resign.    

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Sinkhole

Patterson, Juliet

Last Updated: Jan-18-2023
Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

The first few pages of Sinkhole recount the final moments of the author’s father’s life, as the author imagines they occurred.  Slipping away from the bedroom where his wife sleeps, her father writes a note and leaves the house for the last time.  It is nearly zero degrees in Minneapolis as he proceeds to the park where he usually walks his dog. All of this has been methodically planned: “My father chooses to die on the north end of the bridge.  There, the canopy is so dense that, from the street, the structure appears to grow from the hill. In the dim light spreading from the railings, the crown of its arch bestows darkness” (p.4).
 
Immediately following her father’s suicide, author Juliet Patterson is, naturally, overcome.  After the initial shock, she begins to wonder about her father’s motivation.  She realizes she did not know him as well as she had thought.  Theirs is a family that “rarely talked about important things” (p.9).  One of those things is that both her father’s father and mother’s father had also taken their own lives.  She begins to ask questions: “Who were these men?  What led to these deaths in my family?  What did my family’s history of suicide imply?  And what did it mean for my own future?” (p.10) The remainder of Sinkhole tells the story of how the author investigates the death of her grandfathers, a quest that takes her back to her family’s ancestral home in Kansas.   

One day, on an impulse, the author locates her grandmother’s abandoned house.  Like other properties in this part of the country where there were formerly mines, it has fallen into a sinkhole.  She sees the “terrifying alien world of a sinkhole” (p.111) as a metaphor for “a realm that I could not enter,” as she struggles to make sense of her family’s past. Eventually she undergoes a transformation and comes to terms with her loss.  The least she can do to break the cycle is to be honest about her family history with her young son.     

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Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

Aviv, Rachel

Last Updated: Oct-18-2022
Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

When Rachel Aviv, the author of Strangers to Ourselves, was six years old, she simply stopped eating.  She said she got the idea from the Yom Kippur fast.  She was promptly checked into a psychiatric hospital where she became one of the youngest-ever patients to be given the diagnosis of anorexia.  Through associating with older, more seasoned anorexic girls she became a sort of “anorexic-in-training” (p.13). Fortunately, after a few months she snapped out of it, and was discharged.  She never suffered from the same symptoms again.   

As an adult, Aviv began to think about what had happened to her.  The only remnant of her experience was a diary entry from age 8: “I had a diseas called anexexia” (p.231).  Had she even had the disorder, or had the diagnosis been a mistake?  Why had she not gone on to have “an anorexic ‘career’” (ibid.), while one of the girls who had mentored her ultimately died of anorexia-related causes?   In order to answer these questions for herself, Aviv meets with the therapists who treated her more than thirty years ago as well as with the family of her deceased copatient.   

As a result of Aviv’s introspection, she becomes intrigued by people whose psychiatric diagnoses do not fully capture the complexities of their situation.  Strangers to Ourselves presents detailed case histories of several such individuals.  Bapu is an Indian woman whose visions have caused her to be diagnosed with schizophrenia.  Are they delusions, or is she a mystic?  Naomi is a socially disadvantaged black woman who has struggled unsuccessfully to get ahead.  During a manic episode, she jumps into a river with her young twins, one of whom dies. Her claim that “white people are out to get me” (p. 146) is ignored because her doctors insist that “delusions couldn’t on some level make sense” (p. 150). Yet another woman, Laura, bounces from diagnosis to diagnosis, and sleeps fourteen hours a day because of all the medication she is on.  She becomes one of these people who no longer even know if their lack of functioning is “due to their underlying disorder [or] the heavy medications they’d taken for it” (p. 203).      

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The Urge: Our History of Addiction

Fisher, Carl Erik

Last Updated: May-02-2022
Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

The Urge: Our History of Addiction, by Carl Erik Fisher, a psychiatrist, is really two books in one.  It is a comprehensive history of addiction from ancient times to the present day.  It is also a memoir of the author’s own struggle with addiction and an attempt “to understand how I went from being a newly minted physician in a psychiatry residency program…to a psychiatric patient” (p.ix).  

Fisher has grown up with two alcoholic parents.  Even as his mother’s drinking “suppresses her blood counts and causes her to miss the chemo sessions I have worked so hard to arrange” (p. 294), she does not stop.  Fisher’s own first drink, in high school, is a revelation.  He blows his interview for his first-choice college when he shows up late and hung over. His intelligence enables him to get by, but eventually the problem catches up with him as he begins to use Adderall and marijuana to counteract the effects of alcohol.  After sleeping through and missing his residency orientation, he is under scrutiny.  Finally, he has a drug-induced manic episode that results in his being tasered by the police, and he is forced into treatment.    

In the historical sequences of the book, we discover that one of the oldest known examples of addiction is found as far back as the Rig Veda (1000 BC).  From there we move through time, learning how Native American populations were devastated by alcohol, how Alcoholics Anonymous achieved prominence, and about the multiple challenges that persist to the present day. 

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One Friday in April

Antrim, Donald

Last Updated: Feb-08-2022
Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

As One Friday in April opens, we find Donald Antrim in an agitated state on the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building.  He paces, and alternately climbs down the fire escape, hangs from the railing, and lies on his stomach peering over the ledge.  Repeated outpatient courses of psychotropic medication and psychotherapy have done only so much for his deteriorating mental state, and the situation has come to a head. Disheveled and wild-looking, he manages to return home whereupon his friends take him to a psychiatric hospital.  

A MacArthur Fellow and author of several acclaimed novels, Antrim has previously published a memoir of his upbringing with his alcoholic mother.  In this new memoir, flashbacks of childhood neglect and chaos are juxtaposed with the present day as he takes the reader through the acute phase of his illness:  a lengthy hospitalization, a course of ECT, discharge from the hospital, rehospitalization, and eventual stabilization.   

The author considers his condition to be suicide, noting that “depression is a concavity, a sloping downward and a return.  Suicide, in my experience, is not that.  I believe that suicide is a natural history, a disease process, not an act or a choice, a decision or a wish…I will refer to suicide, not depression” (pp. 14-15).  

The book ends on a hopeful note. After several relationships that might be described as codependent, Antrim meets his current partner, whom he marries.  He sees the roof of his building through his window and remembers a certain Friday in April but is comforted by the sound of his wife playing Chopin and Bach on the piano.  

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How To Be Depressed

Scialabba, George

Last Updated: Nov-28-2021
Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Collection (Essays)

Summary:

How To Be Depressed  is a book with a most unusual structure.  It is introduced by an essay entitled “Intake” that was previously published in a literary magazine.  The bulk of the book, “Documentia,” is taken up by an edited selection of the author’s psychiatric records from 1969 to 2016. It is rounded out by an interview with the author and by his “Tips for the Depressed.”   

Author George Scialabba ascribes his “exceptionally flimsy…shock absorbers” to his “constantly worried” parents (p.3).  While studying at Harvard he becomes involved with a strict religious organization. After leaving that group he undergoes a crisis of faith and his first episode of depression. Paralyzed by self-doubt, he drops out of graduate school and begins a cycle of clerical jobs that are beneath his intellectual capability. After many years he gradually wins distinction as a freelance essayist.  However, due to his incapacitating symptoms he never has a steady writing job and has difficulty attaining financial security.  

In his introduction, Scialabba tells us that “the pain of a severe clinical depression is the worst thing in the world.  To escape it, I would do anything” (p.1).  As attested to by the notes of his well-meaning psychiatrists and psychotherapists, he has diligently applied himself to a wide variety of treatments.  Sadly, if anything he gets worse over time, and eventually requires electroconvulsive therapy. 

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Everything is Fine

Granata, Vince

Last Updated: Oct-03-2021
Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

Vince Granata, the author of Everything is Fine, remembers feeling at the age of 4 that the day his triplet siblings were brought to their suburban Connecticut home from the hospital was the best day of his life.  For many years, to all appearances, his was the perfect family.   

Then, while in college, his brother Tim develops a psychotic disorder.  Refusing treatment, he becomes more and more delusional.  He speaks frequently about killing himself and is convinced his mother has raped him.  Announcing that “demons are everywhere” (p.115) he enters his parents’ bedroom and throws salt at them as they sleep. His mother, though trained as an emergency physician, dismisses the idea he could become violent: “Everything is fine” (p.122).  

When Vince receives a phone call that his brother has killed his mother, he rushes home from teaching abroad to find yellow tape surrounding the house.  The immediate, surrealistic concern is to have a company clean the traces of his mother from the rug.   

Over the next few years, Tim is treated to restore him to competency so he can stand trial.  Vince and his father visit Tim faithfully in a facility while two other siblings cannot bring themselves to face him.  A friend insightfully prophesies “I hope you will eventually be able to find some peace and feel whole again…though that might be your life’s work” (p. 149). Indeed, while his brother recuperates, Vince goes through his own healing process. He dedicates himself to understanding schizophrenia and the shortcomings in our mental health care system, and, finally, writes this book.  

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Born to Be

Cypriano, Tania

Last Updated: Feb-26-2021
Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

Born to Be is a documentary about the trailblazing work being done at the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery.   

The film’s central figure is Jess Ting, a plastic surgeon who studied music at Juilliard before making a career switch to medicine.   Scenes of him with patients are interspersed with domestic clips where he is at home with his children and playing the double bass.  Just a few years ago Ting had never even performed a single gender-affirming surgery.  He is the first to admit that he did not expect his career to take this turn: “Essentially, they just asked everyone else, and everyone said no except for me.  Everyone thought I was nuts.”  Be that as it may, Ting appears to have found his calling.  In a short time, he has performed well over a thousand gender-affirming surgeries, pioneered new procedures, and helped to start a fellowship training program.  

The stories of several of the Center’s patients are interwoven with that of Dr. Ting.  One client, Cashmere, is a retired sex worker.  Years of botched silicone injections have left her face chronically swollen.   Now in her 50’s, she hopes to have the effects reversed, and to finally undergo the vaginoplasty she has been dreaming of her entire life.  Another patient, Devin, 22, goes through a transition during the course of the film, renaming herself Garnet.  Not withstanding strong family support, years of bullying in school have taken their toll as she struggles with depression. 

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Prima Donna: The Psychology of Maria Callas

Wink, Paul

Last Updated: Feb-05-2021
Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction — Secondary Category: Literature /

Genre: Biography

Summary:

Maria Callas, the most famous opera singer of the second half of the 20th century, continues to exert a fascination.  Critical consensus is that Callas fused a technically flawed voice with an extraordinary stage presence to create something unique.  More than forty years after her death, Callas’s recordings continue to be best-sellers, and her life has inspired dozens of biographies.  Prima Donna: The Psychology of Maria Callas appears in Oxford University Press’s Inner Lives series, which consists of psychobiographies of artists that make use of current psychological theory and research.  The focus of author Paul Wink, a psychology professor at Wellesley College, is adult development and narcissism.  

The facts of Callas’s life are well known. She is born in New York City to an ill-matched Greek immigrant couple.  Her father is barely able to keep a roof over their heads.  Her mother Litza struggles to get over the death of an infant son, requiring hospitalization for a suicide attempt. As the story goes, Litza cannot bring herself to look at her new daughter for the first four days of her life.  Litza, who imagines herself in a lofty social class, disdains their neighbors, and thus Maria is discouraged from playing with other children.  When Maria is discovered to have talent, Litza exploits her.   

As Litza’s marriage deteriorates, she brings Maria back to Greece.  With the onset of World War II, they endure hardships.  Yet, improbably, the overweight and awkward Maria shows a streak of brilliance.  She is the hardest working student at the conservatory, quickly outpacing her peers.  On Maria’s first day in Italy, where she gets her first big break, she meets a businessman who is more than twice her age.  Within weeks they are a couple.  For a time, she allows Litza to share in her success, even buying her a fur coat.  But soon, in response to a request for money, she tells her mother to “jump out of the window or drown yourself” (p. 78), and then never speaks to her again.  

Maria loses weight and transforms into the operatic counterpart to Audrey Hepburn.  She enjoys one operatic triumph after another. Nevertheless, she becomes as famous for her bellicose and imperious behavior as for her singing.  She kicks a colleague in the shin after a performance so she can take a solo bow. She is publicly fired from the Metropolitan Opera.  She incurs scandal by suddenly canceling a performance at which the president of Italy is present.   

When the fabulously wealthy Aristotle Onassis courts her, Callas unceremoniously rids herself of her husband.  Soon, her technical flaws catch up with her, and her career dwindles away.  Meanwhile, Onassis goes for a bigger trophy: Jacqueline Kennedy, and Callas is humiliated in the press.  Voiceless, she exiles herself to Paris with her two poodles, develops an addiction to sleeping pills, and dies a decade later, alone.  

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