Word: psychiatrist
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...plate of mashed potatoes. And, it is ultimately Mother who ends her own life. Gray Sexton writes that her mother's suicide attempts were conscious acts and were not solely the results of severe mental illness. When peer confessional poet Sylvia Plath committed suicide, Anne Sexton told her psychiatrist that Plath "took something that was mine--that death was mine...
...were to insist that her mother was a certifiable lunatic then what would she be saying about her poetry? Instead the author is quick to illustrate how gifted her mother was and how deliberate her work had become. The author tells the reader that ever since Anne Sexton's psychiatrist had suggested she write poetry in addition to her therapy, she took to her task completely, making writing her number one priority. Gray Sexton details the workshops, classes and rewrites in which her mother engaged. To her credit, the author is as concerned with presenting the sane and gifted side...
...illness. For the past few decades, the majority of researchers have worked to show that psychiatric disorders are triggered by chemical imbalances in the brain that can be rectified with medication. Breggin, by contrast, clings to an old-fashioned view: the emotional problems that land a person on a psychiatrist's couch result from traumas caused by outside forces, like sexual abuse during childhood. Drugs can't erase these traumas, he asserts, and aren't even appropriate for such severe conditions as schizophrenia and manic depression. "These are not illnesses," he says. "They are ways people become when they...
...psychiatrist's credibility is not helped by the air of flakiness that surrounds his life and work. Lilly regularly links him to the Church of Scientology, which has long been a rabid opponent of psychiatry. Breggin admits that he was once an ally of the group and that his wife was a member. But he insists they both renounced Scientology more than two decades ago. Lilly, meanwhile, has combed through his old books and articles in search of anything embarrassing -- just like the conservatives who used Lani Guinier's writings to scuttle her nomination to serve in the Justice Department...
...patients' agonizing struggles to recover. Though sufferers appear withdrawn and disoriented, they are often painfully aware of themselves. "The person with schizophrenia has literally no emotional strength," explains Brandon Fitch, 21, a recovered patient who adds happily that medication has "liberated me from quite a few of my symptoms." Psychiatrist Wayne Fenton, who treated Murray Frances, laments that people who see a schizophrenic behaving strangely often assume that the patient "is someone who doesn't have feelings, who doesn't have a memory, who doesn't experience pain." Pioneering researcher Dr. John Kane points out that new drugs have helped...