Faith and Madness

Nobody loves a father like his daughter. That truth comes through powerfully in this memoir. Sarah was enchanted by her father; she loved him with all her young heart. But when she turned five, her father began to do strange things. His bizarre behavior ultimately cost him his job at a major pharmacy in Detroit. The time was the 1930s, with no medication for manic depressive disorder. Sarah joins forces with her mother and younger brother to contain the psychosis that with repeated hospitalizations relentlessly tightens its hold on her father. When she is seven, she watches her father's third episode of mania mount and vows never to let this happen to her-she would be strong with a faith like her valiant mother's. Nevertheless, when Sarah entered her second year at Wayne State University, she was gripped by severe depression and anorexia that almost took her life. Had she inherited her father's illness? Or had challenges to her. Christian faith during her first year of university caused this depression? No one knew. The help of a department store, an astute psychiatrist, and an Anglican priest illustrate the interplay between financial, psychological, and spiritual resources in unraveling the mystery of Sarah's depression. Book jacket.

Sarah Slagle Arnold is a psychologist/psychoanalyst and writer living in Maine. For thirty years she was in private practice in New York City and on the faculty of the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health.