Book ID: CBB129442531

Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (2018)

unapi

Montgomery, Sarah Fawn (Author)


Mad Creek Books


Publication Date: 2018
Physical Details: 296
Language: English

Diagnosed with severe anxiety, PTSD, and OCD in her early twenties, Sarah Fawn Montgomery spent the next ten years seeking treatment and the language with which to describe the indescribable consequences of her mental illness. Faced with disbelief, intolerable side effects, and unexpected changes in her mental health as a result of treatment, Montgomery turned to American history and her own personal history—including her turbulent childhood and the violence she faced as a young woman—to make sense of the experience. Blending memoir with literary journalism, Montgomery’s Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir examines America’s history of mental illness treatment—lobotomies to sterilization, the rest cure to Prozac—to challenge contemporary narratives about mental health. Questioning what it means to be a woman with highly stigmatized disorders, Montgomery also asks why mental illness continues to escalate in the United States despite so many “cures.” Investigating the construction of mental illness as a “female” malady, Montgomery exposes the ways current attitudes towards women and their bodies influence madness as well as the ways madness has transformed to a chronic Illness in our cultural imagination. Montgomery’s Quite Mad is one woman’s story, but it offers a beacon of hope and truth for the millions of individuals living with mental illness and issues a warning about the danger of diagnosis and the complex definition of sanity.

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Multimedia Object Zoë Bossiere; Sarah Fawn Montgomery (2020) Sarah Fawn Montgomery, “Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir” (Mad Creek Books, 2018). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB129442531/

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Authors & Contributors
Raz, Mical
Montgomery, Sarah Fawn
Drake, Simone
Theobald, Brianna
Fulkerson-Dikuua, Kelly Jo
Michael Pfeiffer
Concepts
Psychiatry
Mental disorders and diseases
Therapeutic practice; therapy; treatment
Lobotomy
Neurosurgery; psychosurgery
Medicine and gender
Time Periods
20th century
21st century
19th century
20th century, late
Early modern
20th century, early
Places
United States
North America: United States; Canada
South Africa
Germany
China
Great Britain
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