I don't really know what to make of this book. The memoir is about the author's experiences dealing with psychiatrists, psychologists, and other therapists through the years in response to anorexia, alcoholism, and other various issues (the author uses the words "edginess," "splintering," "cracking" -- whatever they mean). The author concludes that since the DSM is not based on any real empirical data, and the illnesses in the DSM have no biological reality, that her diagnoses were invalid. Yet some of the meds she was prescribed appear to have helped her, and she concludes that she will continue taking them.

I mean, I can't disagree with the author's experience. Mental illness is such a weird thing, where so many people "have it," but nobody can say what causes it and what fixes it, and how to really diagnose and categorize in an objective way. I am not unsympathetic to the anti-psychiatry crowd. But I wonder... what was the author's point in writing this book? Anger at what she went through? Something else? This book does contain lots of citations about other people's work, but I do not find this book to be a particularly compelling exposure of the weakness of psychiatry, which has been detailed in many other texts. While relatable at times, I did not find the author's life narrative to be compelling enough to justify a full-length book either.

Yet, to top it off, the author concludes at the end of the book that the rationale for her illness(es?) can be explained by: evolutionary psychology. I mean, if you wanted to take a current trend that had the absolute minimum basis in actual empirical fact, and is based on the rationalizations and assumptions made by (mostly) male and (mostly) white academics, evopsych would be that trend. It is not scientific, it is not empirical, and it is not feminist either. (Cave women make babies while cave men hunt. Duh.) So how does the author square her distrust of the DSM (for science reasons!) and not realize that evopsych is not in the least bit scientific.

Weaved in throughout the narrative is a history and some information about different types of punctuation. I guess in case you forgot the author is a writer and teaches English. I wasn't sure what these digressions added to the memoir. ( )

This is a very interesting criticism of psychiatry, psychiatric meds, and the DSM written by a pretty unappealing woman. After all the pain she goes through I'm left thinking that, rather than psychiatry, what she needed was a good grandma or life coach or best friend who could have guided her toward some reasonable goals in life and told her to stop thinking only about herself all the time. But I know, that's what people without major psychiatric disorders usually think about those with them. ( )