Join acclaimed writer and editor Sarah Fay for a discussion of her book “Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses.”
VIRTUAL EVENT DETAILS
[In Conversation by Leslie Jamison]
Monday March 21, 2022 7:00 PM ET
Harvard Book Store
Get Tickets: https://www.harvard.com/event/virtual_event_sarah_fay/
About the Author:
Sarah Fay’s writing appears in many publications, including Longreads, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time Magazine, and The Paris Review, where she served as an advisory editor. Her essays have been nominated for Best American Essays and a Pushcart Prize. She is the recipient of the Hopwood Award for Literature and currently teaches in the English departments at DePaul University and Northwestern University.
About the Book:
“This book is a triumph of the spirit and the flesh.”—ELIZA GRISWOLD, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Amity and Prosperity
“Masterfully written, distinctively researched, deeply humane . . . Genius.”—ANTHONY SWOFFORD, author of Jarhead
“A major contribution . . . A necessary book.”—JOHANN HARI, author of Lost Connections
In this stunning debut—both a memoir and a work of investigative journalism that joins the ranks of works by Mary Karr, Leslie Jamison, and Joan Didion—writer Sarah Fay explores the ways we pathologize human experiences.
Over thirty years, doctors diagnosed Sarah Fay with six different mental illnesses—anorexia, major depressive disorder (MDD), anxiety disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and bipolar disorder. Pathological is the gripping story of what it was like to live with those diagnoses, and the crippling impact each had on her life. It is also a rigorous investigation into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)—psychiatry’s “bible,” the manual from which all mental illness diagnoses come. Like the millions of Americans who’ll receive DSM diagnoses in their lifetimes, she believed the DSM and its diagnoses were valid, only to discover that this revered manual has little scientific merit.
