Book Review/A Mind Apart
Writer explores depth of mental illness
A Mind Apart
By Susanne Antonetta
$24.95 Hardbound
Penguin
A book review/Jan. 26. 2006
By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review
When Susanne Antonetta wrote her best selling book, "Body Toxic," which could be best described by her subtitle, "An Environmental Memoir," it was a tell-all personal account of her growing up years
on the East Coast where her body was poisoned by the careless contamination of natural resources. It was a candid account of how her paradise became a toxic landscape and a series of ills that assaulted her body as a result.
What makes the book so readable was her matter-of-fact tone in telling the story of enduring years of illnesses she related to having lived in the shadow of a nuclear power plant and a chemical plant in New Jersey. Now she has written a second book, "A Mind Apart," an extension of her earlier work, telling about her "travels in a neurodiverse world, with the same poetic precision,"
The Bellingham, Wash. writer reveals immediately that she is bipolar and suffers from manic depression. This confession makes the book more plausible because she is writing about a subject she knows all too well. This book is probably not for every reader, although perhaps every reader should read it to understand neurodiversity.
She asserts that the number of adults with bipolar disorder seems to be stable at one to two percent of the population, but what concerns her is that the bipolar affliction is being diagnosed more frequently in young children.
While the book does an in-depth exploration of bipolar affliction, it does a marvelous job of explaining and exploring autism, anxiety, depression, abd attention-deficit disorder, a mental illness she aptly describes as the "hummingbird mind," because "the mind hovers and darts among, many things, never entirely planting itself."
Perhaps the biggest concern is the 1.5 million Americans who suffer from autism. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates as many as 1 in 166 babies will be diagnosed with autism this year. Because autism affects everyone differently, this makes diagnoses and treatment difficult.
She explains each of the mental disorders in terms the reader can understand. She shares in some depth her own struggles and even quotes her husband, Bruce as wanting to understand her so much that he once wished "I could be manic depressive for a little while." To that, she adds "It is cool in a way. What you want to do, you can do. I’ve replanted my garden, thrown great parties, written books in manic fits."
But then there is the down side, she writes:
"My manias tend to end in spikes of paranoia and doom — poison gas in the house, bullets whizzing in the air — the condition is a sword you fall upon eventually."
Because she is writing from experience, at least as a manic depressive, Antonetta comes across as knowledgeable about her subject. She takes a wide-range approach, integrating research on the ways neurological differences exist, with stories and anecdotes from her own and others around her. She even discovered in herself, a photographic memory and explains it this way:
"When I moved…to my small house in Bellingham, I decided in one of my manic-obsessive fits to plant every plant I’d ever seen mentioned in a Shakespeare play. This meant, because I have something of a photographic memory (a manic gift), lying awake at night reading off fragments of the plays in my head."
Equipped with this unique knowledge, she drove to Seattle to shop for the plants that were so firm in her mind from the pages of Shakespeare’s plays. "My yard now blooms with unintentional comedy," she wrote.
It is a world in which some live apart by the very workings of their mind. On the plus side, she finds great hope in that those with neurological differences contribute greatly to art, poetry and science.
"A Mind Apart" urges readers to look beyond the surface and identify the gifts that are inherent in many neuroatypical conditions of other fellow humans.
(Bill Duncan is editor of The Senior Times. He also writes a weekly column on the Thursday News-Review Opinion page)