Mothering requires two impulses- the impulse to hold on, and the impulse to push away.
It is the sincere horror of it that gets others motivated, so say Watson and Andrews; the dysfunction caused by the onset of depression may serve a useful function in that it is a device for the elici...
In the heat of an argument, my mother once told me, Someday you can go to a therapist and tell him all about how your terrible mother ruined your life. But it will be your ruined life you're talking a...
If you attach better services to a diagnostic category, some doctors will apply that diagnosis to children from whom it is not entirely appropriate in order to access those services.
I went to Cambodia to be humbled by the pain of others, and I was humbled down to the ground.
I had thought that when you feel your worst your tears flood, but the very worst pain is the arid pain of total violation that comes after the tears are all used up, the pain that stops up every space...
For some parents of children with horizontal identities, acceptance reaches its apogee when parents conclude that while they supposed they were pinioned by a great and catastrophic loss of hope, they...
Cleaving to our own lives, with all their challenges and limitations and particularities, is vital.
Cerebral palsy is any disability caused by damage to the cerebrum before birth, just afterward, or in the first three years of life.
The polar opposite of suffering [is] boredom. I believe that pain needs to be transformed but not forgotten; gainsaid but not obliterated. I
You don’t think in depression that you’ve put on a grey veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now y...
You cannot understand the otherness of places you have not encountered. If all young adults were required to spend two weeks in a foreign country, two-thirds of the world's diplomatic problems could b...
Woody Allen once quipped that dwarf is once of the four funniest words in the English language. To be in your very essence perceived as comical is a significant burden.
When the child does not conform to this image, the parents often need help in adapting their behavior to the reality—they
This book’s conundrum is that most of the families described here have ended up grateful for experiences they would have done anything to avoid.
Some opponents of (cochlear) implants have proposed that people make their own choice when they turn eighteen. Even putting aside the neural issues that make this impractical, it is a flawed propositi...
So many people have asked me what to do for depressed friends and relatives, and my answer is actually simple: blunt their isolation. Do it with cups of tea or with long talks or by sitting in a room...
It is not pleasant to experience decay, to find yourself exposed to the ravages of an almost daily rain, and to know that you are turning into something feeble, that more and more of you will blow off...
It is mad for adolescents to rage at parents who have done their best, but it is a conventional madness, uniform enough so that we tolerate it relatively unquestioningly.
In typical circumstances, to have children who won't care for you in your dotage is to be King Lear. Disability changes the reciprocity equation.