Table of Contents

Contents

• About the Editors
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Childhood
• The Killing Jar
• My Tenth Year
• Land Where Our Fathers Died
• The Orange Coat
• Wanderer
• Learning
• Mother's Savage Wait; Someone Else's Making
• A Father's Love
• Lisa's Ritual, Age Ten
• Willie and Winston
• Two Mean Boys
• Part II: Adolescence
• Bonfires
• Double Fuselage Model
• Liberty Seventeen
• Drive
• Soldier Boy
• Part III: Family Relationships in Adulthood
• On Not Being Seen
• Mother Stew
• Coffee
• Elaine
• Daddy's Girls
• Coffee, 7 a.m.
• Cigarettes
• Paper Plates
• The Answer Is: Grocery Bags
• Downstairs Apartment
• The Gravity Machine
• Part IV: Other Issues of Adulthood
• The Invisibility Syndrome
• Against the Odds
• Hag
• Telling Mr. M.
• Dance Away
• The Self Family
• Part V: Physical Illness
• When I Was Old
• Beauty Shop
• The Price of Admission
• Stroke
• Dear Doctor
• What If?
• When Your Surgeon Is the Muse
• Part VI: Surviving and Healing Childhood Trauma
• The Ring of Truth
• Letter to Margaret
• Hurt
• A Sharp Feel
• Sacrifice
• Part VII: Mental Disorders
• Anxiety Disorders
• The Color of Disorder
• Step on a Crack, Break Your Mother's Back
• Prone to Panic
• Going to Pieces
• Through the Woods, Darkly
• Mood Disorders
• Karen
• Dry Dock
• Mad Colored Woman: A Memoir of Manic Depression
• Madwoman: A Mental Health Professional Living with Mental Illness
• Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders
• The Sleep of Reason
• Searching the Headlights
• Dissociative Disorders
• Dissociative Identity Disorder
• A Narrative of Survival
• Eating Disorders
• The Shape of Things
• Two Raisinets and a Corn Flake
• Substance Abuse
• That Goddamed Van Gogh
• I Lost You to Liquor
• Mother We're Going for a Ride
• Diagnosis Problems
• Look So Normal
• In Search of a Diagnosis
• Part VIII: Families Coping with Mental Illness
• Fear
• Mary and John
• The Fool on the Hill
• Just Wondering; Sometimes I Pretend You're Dead
• Hostages
• The Pass
• Shocking Mother: A Memoir of Mental Illness and Recovery
• My Mother Is Back
• All Good Things Happen Below the Belt
• Part IX: Practice in an Imperfect System
• Rose Cottage
• One Flew East, One Flew West
• At the Bottom of the Ocean: Remembering the Psych Ward
• Kaiser Mental Health--1998
• Caseworker; This One; Case Summary: Homer Human
• Juniper and the Balance of Life
• The Women's Group
• Part X: Old Age
• From the Perspective of the Elderly Persons
• Time's Winged Chariot
• Old Age
• Cerebral Dust
• From the Perspective of the Caretaker
• Growing Old in an Alien Land
• With Respect to Reba
• Peaches
• Sounds
• Flying Time

About the Author

Jessica K Heriot, Eileen J Polinger