Hello everyone, finally time for another review!
While browsing my libby app, I wanted some sort of self-help/biography non-fiction of some sort, about mental illnesses close to home. I then found this one, which got me super into it from the few pages that I had read on the sample.
4 / 5 stars
Trigger warning for talk of Suicide idealisation/attempts.
This is definately not a book for everyone, Especially the first part where we get a real good look on her depression aswell as her stay in a psych ward & what brought her there. Maybe with how my depression had been acting up because of Covid, this wasn’t quite the best timing for me to read it either — but I loved the psychology behind it and seeing the same way I feel/felt mirrored into someone else.
The second part got more of a “backstage” look at how the pharmaceutic industry is looking at depression… which is quite honestly more depressing to me. The need for more accurate meds is increasing, but as it’s not as paying as say, the Cancer treatments and such, The companies has no want to even *try* to get better medication done.. Solely because it takes lots of money to Research and develops and they just can’t get their money back. I guess I can understand from a “industry” point of view, but I can’t fanthom how you can just.. knowingly let down so many struggling people 😓
Although i’m lucky that my medication do work, some treatments methods did look quite interesting.. While some looked a bit pulled by the hair, like the use of magic mushrooms.
This book was very educational, which has been part of what i’ve wanted — The author not only shared her own struggles but also did lots of researchs, aswell as interviewing experts and get other people’s stories.
Highlights from the book;
« All thoses tortured brainiacs are far outnumbered by poor fuckers who’re just tortured. Mental Illness made me incurious, inert. I retrated into myself. I struggled to write. »
Part. 1, p. 65
« We see and hear the untreated, acutely psychotic shoeless man screaming in the street, or our loved ones who have not yet responded to their medications. By contract, the mental illnesses of our colleagues or friends who have remitted with treatment are invisible. »
Part. 2, p. 224