Description: A compassionate and captivating examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma.
Brief description: Roy Richard Grinker is professor of anthropology and international affairs at the George Washington University. He is the author of several books, including Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism. He lives in Washington, DC.
Review Quotes: An unusually engaging history of mental illness and the stigma attached to it. Roy Richard Grinker threads together the attitudes of society toward psychiatric illness with the lives and work of his ancestors and his daughter's experience of autism. The result is an informative and thoughtful book about mental illness: common, painful, usually treatable, and profoundly tied to the human condition.--Kay Redfield Jamison, Pulitzer Prize finalist for Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire