Girls and Their Monsters
Book description
For readers of Hidden Valley Road and Patient H.M., an “intimate and compassionate portrait” (Grace M. Cho) of the Genain quadruplets, the harrowing violence they experienced, and its psychological and political consequences, from the author of The Unfit Heiress.
In 1954, researchers at the newly formed National Institute of Mental…
Why read it?
2 authors picked Girls and Their Monsters as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Okay, this one is definitely not light reading (trigger warning for just about any type of abuse you can think of) but Girls and their Monsters was an amazingly well-written and researched book that covers so much about how mental illness has been treated in the US throughout the decades.
It follows the story of four sisters all eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and brings you into their world through all the good and bad to the point that (even with the heavy topics) I managed to get this one back to the library within a few days of checking it…
The Genain Sisters were the most famous case history in psychiatric genetics, and to this day are held up as proof of the supposed genetic basis of those conditions called “mental illness.” But, in fact, their sad story ended up revealing far more about the arrogance and willful blindness of its chroniclers than it did about its purported subjects.
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