Susanne Paola Antonetta

About

Susanne Paola Antonetta's latest book is The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here. Forthcoming in 2025 is The Devil's Castle: Eugenics, Nazi Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Hurts Us Now. She is also the author of Make Me a Mother, Entangled Objects, Body Toxic, A Mind Apart, and four books of poetry. Her awards include a New York Times Notable Book, an American Book Award, an Amazon Best Memoir of the Year award, and others. Her essays and poems have appeared in The New York Times, Ms., The Huffington Post, The UK Independent, The Hill, Orion, Psychology Today, and The New Republic and have been featured on CNN as well as the CBC Ideas documentary series. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

Books by Susanne Paola Antonetta

Recent Posts

The Neurodivergent Brilliance of William Shakespeare

Personal Perspective: As a young girl, I became obsessed with Shakespeare's King Lear. Now I realize it taught me the truths of transformative madness and pernicious sanity.

A Burning Brain: The Dark Side of Psychiatric Drugging

Personal Perspective: Going down on psych meds set my brain on fire. Why has long-term use become the standard in psychiatric medicating?

The Breathtaking Diversity of the Human Mind

Talking about a transformative "perceptual diversity" with neuroscientist Anil Seth gives new ways to consider neurodiversity and the wild creativity of the human mind.

Britney Spears: The Pain of Misogyny, Not Mental Illness

A Personal Perspective: Britney Spears' memoir, The Woman in Me, tells the story of her 13-year conservatorship—and what allowed it to happen.

Booby Hatches: The Crisis in Psychiatric Hospitalization

A Personal Perspective: The crisis in psychiatric hospitalization goes back decades. A 1960 experiment conducted by psychologist David Rosenhan shows how far we haven't come.

If You Want a Better Psychiatry, Go Back 200 Years

The great reformer Philippe Pinel founded a humane psychiatry during the French Revolution. Today, we've forgotten the lessons of his moral treatment.

We Need an End to Psychiatry by Proxy

Personal Perspective: For too long, people have relied on psychiatry by proxy, using scales and neat categories to diagnose and medicate. Here's why that doesn't work.

Are Lying Politicians Mentally Ill?

A Personal Perspective: The word crazy is low-hanging fruit in the insult world.

Madness, Hallucination, Self-Love

A Nazi survivor named Dorothea Buck taught me to make meaning out of madness.

Mental Difference and Medical Gaslighting

A Personal Perspective: Your psychiatric diagnosis can adversely affect your medical care. Being aware of the problem can help you get what you need.