A Mind Apart: Travels in a Neurodiverse World
Susanne Antonetta
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1585423823
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In A Mind Apart, Susanne Antonetta draws on her personal experience with manic depression, as well as interviews with people with multiple personality disorder, autism, schizophrenia, and other "neuroatypical" conditions, to construct a fascinating portrait of how the world shapes itself in minds that are profoundly different from the norm. As with her previous book, which Michael Pollan praised in the New York Times Book Review as "a challenge to our prevailing notions of science and journalism and even literary narrative," A Mind Apart employs a unique fusion of literary genres to draw readers into the experience of people with neurological conditions and to consider what their alternate ways of perceiving may, in fact, have to teach us.
According to the United States Department of Health the number of people being diagnosed with autism has been increasing by approximately twenty percent a year over the last decade. AD/HD, Tourette's, and chronic depression have been spreading at commensurate rates. Sifting through the many abilities that underlie these and other mental "disabilities"- the "visual consciousness" of an autistic or the "metaphoric consciousness" of a manic-depressive-Antonetta reveals just how much "normally" functioning people can learn from those with neurological disorders. This fascinating blend of memoir, journalism, and science will be of deep interest to readers of Temple Grandin's Thinking in Pictures or Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon.
Research Design and Methods: A Process Approach
The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves
In the City: Random Acts of Awareness
a move that seems remarkably self-defeating. “Two more razor knives, more dowel…” “Killing with Syringes,” a Nazi article, based on experiments at Auschwitz. WHEN I WAS A WILD GIRL OF FIFTEEN, hopeless, I had a boyfriend who slept—I slept with him—with a weapon of some sort tacked up over the bed. I think it was a gun; he had guns, anyway, but it may have been a knife, and whatever it was, he doted on it. This boyfriend owned a number of guns; most of the boys I knew did; they were drug
thing: me, a primate, a top predator, using this convention that I’m just a voice. Occasionally I tease you, reader, by telling you what I’m doing. To speak to you, unknown but curious predator lushly centered in this world we’ve made over in our image: this piece of time called the homogocene, the human world. Patchily furred, easily cold, but javelin-toothed we are. In these linguistic spaces we butt consciousnesses, easily, like horned sheep, and break apart. Really we are warm—nearly one
presume they are, to be crotchety. The mood on campus feels more like what I expected. People float into the auditorium for the first part of the conference, mostly middle-aged people, like me, and most with a touch of the unusual in their dress: a turban, piles of African bracelets, a long mint-colored scarf. I’m wearing a long multicolored duster, and I suppose when I dressed this morning I had this kind of audience in mind. Among the university leaders more sober suits are the norm; the
up having dreamed the same elaborate dream. We dreamed of the death of a mother and found out later a friend’s mother was dying. Let’s see if we can read each other’s minds, you say. You say, I’m thinking of a color. I do see a stripe of velvet color in my mind, in front, almost, of my thinking, which is trying to find a way out of your experiment. I don’t want to know we can’t do this; I don’t want to know we can. Blue. Blue. That’s it. Try a number from one to ten. Five. Five. We’re
an Artist Trust grant from Washington State for poetry, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant for nonfiction. She lives on the shores of Puget Sound, in Washington, with her husband and son.
