Published in 2022
9 hours and 13 minutes
Sarah Fay is an author and activist. Her memoir Pathological: A True Story of Six Misdiagnoses (2022) is an investigation into the invalidity and unreliability of mental health diagnoses. Her writing appears in many publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time Magazine, The New Republic, Longreads, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, The Millions, McSweeney’s, The Believer, and The Paris Review, where she served as an advisory editor. Her essays have been chosen as a Notable Mention in Best American Essays and nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She’s the recipient of the Hopwood Award for Literature, as well as grants and fellowships from Yaddo, the Mellon Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony, among others. She is currently on faculty in the English departments at Northwestern University and DePaul University. She’s the founder of Pathological: The Movement, a public awareness campaign devoted to empowering people to make more informed decisions about their mental health.
What is this book about?
In this stunning debut–both a memoir and a work of investigative journalism–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. Yet as Fay found out, some of our most prominent psychiatrists have been trying to warn us that the DSM is fiction sold to the public as fact.
In Pathological, former advisory editor at The Paris Review and award-winning writer Fay calls for a new conversation about mental health diagnosis, one based on rigorous transparency. With exquisite detail and a precise presentation of fact, she digs up her own life at the root to finally ask, Is a diagnosis a lifeline or a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Powerful, mesmerizing, and unputdownable, Pathological sits alongside the other brave and inspiring classics of our time that explore a more intelligent, forgiving, and nuanced approach to human suffering.
