Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged mental illness

How We Got Barb Back: The Story of My Sister’s Reawakening After 30 Years of Schizophrenia

“There is a truism in the mental health community that says that troubled families focus on the sickest member, even welcoming the sickness, to avoid dealing with other problems,” writes Margaret Hawkins on page 77. By this time, I had been fully introduced to her family and was struck by the truth of this statement. Margy’s family story began as so many others did in the mid-twentieth century. Dad is a professional, Mom stays home with the children, three children live in a safe suburb, walk to school, argue with each other, and clamor for more freedom.

In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play (8/29/2010)

“Please turn off anything that beeps, buzzes, or vibrates.” And with that comic admonishment to the audience, Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer Sarah Ruhl’s play about the advent of vibrators began. The setting is Dr. Givings home, where his living room is located next to, and within earshot of, the “surgical theater.” Here, Dr. Givings (played by Eric Hissom) treats hysteria, a “medical ailment” dating back to about 300 BC, when Hippocrates thought women’s madness stemmed from their womb.

Louder Than Words: Marni

Louder Than Words is a series aimed at teenagers about teenage experiences. Atypically, the volumes are also written by teenagers.

The Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives

Almost everyone knows someone they would describe as a hypochondriac—a friend or relative who is obsessed with ambiguous symptoms, or who hears about a disease and immediately fears they have contracted it. In contemporary pop culture, “hypochondriac” is frequently a pejorative term, and one who suffers from “health phobia” is commonly an object of mockery. The condition is sometimes confused in media portrayals with malingering or deliberate “faking.” But hypochondria has not always been thought of as a mental problem.

Another Life Altogether

Elaine Beale crafts the engrossing coming-of-age and coming out story of Jesse Bennet in Another Life Altogether. Jesse lives on the northeast coast of England, one of the world’s fastest eroding coastlines. The constant threat of the breakdown of the cliffs is mirrored by Jesse’s mother’s constant threat of mental collapse.

Blood Sistas: The Chronicals of Black Uptown Girlz Growing Up in the Hood

As a White girl growing up in rural Wisconsin, I had no idea what city life was like. Post-college, I traveled, hoping to broaden my horizons and learn a bit about urban living. After that, I thought I had some pretty good ideas about what growing up in the city was like: living in an apartment, going to the laundromat, shopping at the small supermarket down the street, and hearing traffic and sirens twenty-four hours a day. After reading this book, I can tell you I know absolutely nothing about the intricacies of inner-city life.

Approaching Neverland: A Memoir of Epic Tragedy and Happily Ever After

I think a lot of writers, regardless of genre, dislike it when people ask, “So, what’s your book about?” I think they dislike it because oftentimes the inquirer (whether a bar buddy, an aunt, or literary agent) cannot take the time to sit down and feel the emotional pulse of the work. What they really want is for the writer to give them the SparkNotes version, the blurb, or the pitch.

Atmospheric Disturbances

In some cases, you may be midway through a story, novel, or film before realizing you’re dealing with an unreliable narrator. He or she is biased, withholding information, or mentally unstable. (Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s disturbing story “The Yellow Wallpaper” springs to mind as just one example.) In Atmospheric Disturbances, the debut novel by Rivka Galchen, it is apparent early on that the main character, psychiatrist Dr.

United States of Tara

For those who might have been living in a remote village in the Amazonian jungle in 2007, Diablo Cody is an Oscar-winning screenwriter whose debut success, Juno, is still fresh in everyone’s minds. Its witty repartee and kooky characters were what made it so exceptional.

The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness

We rarely have the opportunity to hear from people diagnosed with schizophrenia. As a result, the disease remains misunderstood and maligned, confused with multiple personality disorder, and the butt of several jokes. In writing The Center Cannot Hold, Elyn Saks has, in part, set out to remedy this, and she has acquitted herself most admirably. Saks’s life is an interesting one.

Emergency Contact

If there is a politic of poetry at stake in Emergency Contact, it stems as much from the a politicized urban landscape, as it does from the poetic representation of that setting. Against the familiar backdrop of a neighbourhood in the process of an irrevocable gentrification, Ziniuk records the objects, people and small hi-stories―perhaps otherwise unregistered―of Toronto’s west end neighbourhood Parkdale.

Criminal of Poverty: Growing up Homeless in America

We never hear from the poor. They are simply not represented in public life. Perhaps it is because we don't think they deserve to have a say. After all, one of the strongest myths in American society is that any person can succeed as long as she is willing to work hard and never give up. What I like about Criminal of Poverty is that the writer, Tiny, a.k.a.