Book Reviews Archives - KARTAR DIAMOND

Snap Out Of It by Kartar Diamond

You don’t hear a lot of young people use the expression, “snap out of it,” but I heard those words on TV and in movies regularly while growing up. It’s a response to a person who may be in a funk, another dated term, to describe a depressed state. The individual who says “snap out of it,” is usually annoyed or exasperated because they don’t understand what the troubled person is actually experiencing or the seriousness of their dysfunction. A stereotypical example of [...]

By Kartar Diamond|2022-03-27T22:11:08+00:00March 27, 2022|Advocacy, Book Reviews, Family|0 Comments

Suspended Sentence: A Memoir by Janice Morgan

What Morgan’s book manages to do, is tell a very personal, compelling story about her relationship with her son, while at the same time giving the reader a glimpse into what it is like to have a mentally ill loved one, in this case her son Dylan, and to have everything about the illness affect everything else in your life. Once her son’s mental illness emerges, and at a heart-breaking young age, thus begins the journey, the Holy Grail, of trying to understand [...]

By Kartar Diamond|2021-05-16T15:07:48+00:00February 20, 2021|Book Reviews, Family, Mental Illness|0 Comments

Ben Behind His Voices: One Family’s Journey From the Chaos of Schizophrenia to Hope

Ben Behind His Voices: One Family’s Journey From the Chaos of Schizophrenia to Hope By Randye Kaye This book was published in 2011, but unfortunately it is what the literary world calls an “evergreen.” This means the information in it is always timely and is not outdated. The unfortunate part includes the fact that so many families, like Randye Kaye and her son, continue to suffer the pervasive emotional trauma and societal stigma for having serious mental illness. Worse yet, there is still [...]

By Kartar Diamond|2020-12-19T19:36:10+00:00December 19, 2020|Book Reviews, Family, Mental Illness|0 Comments

He Came In With It-A Book Review by Kartar Diamond

He Came In With It: A Portrait of Motherhood and Madness by Miriam Feldman A Book Review Before sitting down to review of this memoir, I read over some of the praises by others. The author’s writing style is so engrossing that she deserves a very unique review from me and I’ll strive not to be redundant. I approached He Came In With It from the perspective of also being a mother with a son who has schizophrenia, and also as an author [...]

By Kartar Diamond|2020-10-13T20:45:37+00:00October 13, 2020|Book Reviews, Family|0 Comments

Breakdown: A Clinician’s Experience In A Broken System of Emergency Psychiatry

I had a very personal interest in reading Breakdown, by Lynn Nanos, L.I.C.S.W., because I have a family member with schizophrenia. Along with many others, I have felt intensely frustrated with every aspect of the mental health care system, including hospitals and their staff. I needed to find out what she had to report from her own professional experiences as a mobile emergency psychiatric clinician, with the special skills and ability to orchestrate involuntary hospital admissions. The book is well written, heart-wrenching in [...]

By Kartar Diamond|2020-09-21T03:58:08+00:00September 21, 2020|Advocacy, Book Reviews, Policy|0 Comments

Review of Hidden Valley Road

Book Review Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family Robert Kolker’s book, Hidden Valley Road, is a distinct work in the midst of an upsurge in books about serious mental illness. He chronicles the events and transformation of a 1960’s family with twelve children, producing six boys with schizophrenia. To be clear: The mother had no idea some of her children had mental illness until after they were all born. Decades later, the family members’ contribution to medical research through [...]

By Kartar Diamond|2020-09-11T23:28:55+00:00September 11, 2020|Book Reviews, Mental Illness|0 Comments