A Legacy of Madness is in the top 20 list of books on suicide

A Legacy of Madness is in the top 20 list of books on suicide.

Given every that is happening with the National Football League, and the recent suicide of NFL star Junior Seau, this book is completely relevant and should be considered a reference for people who are suffering.

Book Review: A Legacy of Madness

From BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog:

Jennifer Nelson reviews Tom Davis’s A Legacy of Madness: Recovering My Family from Generations of Mental Illness
Hazelden 2011

Years ago, I dated a mentally ill man. He wrote hours on end without breaks for food or sleep, roared loudly at the slightest joke, and later suffered a complete breakdown that required hospitalization. At first, I brushed off concerns about his mental state. I was going out with an eccentric artist who was so generous that I could never give him up. One day he confessed he was bipolar, but his illness was managed through medication and counseling. In my heart, I knew he wasn’t the right one to wed, but had he been, could I have lived with a man who could be manic one day and depressed the next?

Tom Davis, the author of A Legacy of Madness, lucked out in marrying a woman who helped him overcome his mental health disorder. Together, they took their son, who became sick after crying and anxious over any stress, to a psychiatrist. They aimed to break the cycle of madness that had plagued generations in his family. In fact, Tom’s great-great grandmother, Lydia Winans, and her sons, Frederick and Edward, all committed suicide by gas asphyxiation, and his mother and grandfather exhibited bizarre behavior. Davis painstakingly researched his family’s history, and in the process, he discovered more about his own mental instability.

In the early twentieth century, Tom’s grandfather, Dick, suppressed symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder through drinking vodka and beer; ironically, he headed personnel at the famous Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Morris Plains, N.J. There, Tom’s mother, Dede, witnessed lunatics running wildly outside and gazing through bars on the windows of dark stone buildings. Her father wandered patients’ wings that reeked of urine. Certainly, growing up in such a place impacted a young girl’s perception. “At Christmas, they didn’t look out and see kids throwing snowballs at each other and decorated houses lining the streets,” Davis wrote. “They didn’t look out in July and see fireworks or kids jumping into pools and playing baseball in the street. They saw only what my mother would call ‘the nuthouse,’ one of the largest psychiatric facilities in the country, staring them down every day.”

In this ambitious book, Tom digs into his relatives’ past, jumping from Hightstown in the 1930s, where his grandfather grew up, to Point Pleasant in the 1970s, where his parents and siblings lived. He talks about the trials of living with a mother who obsessively washed her hands, constantly asked her husband if he loved her, and hit her children. His father escaped to the New Jersey shore to relieve the stress of living with his unbalanced wife. Tom recounts how as a young adult, he suffered through eating disorders, tightness in his chest, and feelings of despair. One day, he contemplates driving his car into a river. “Once again, I thought of my mother and my grandfather, how they could be self-destructive, how they didn’t seem to care what came next,” Tom wrote. “Was I self-destructing too?” He calls his wife, who orders him to visit a doctor. His doctor prescribes Lexapro, which keeps Tom mentally balanced. He severs the cycle of madness that had plagued his family, and, in the process, provides hope for others whose thoughts darken even on the brightest days.

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Jennifer Nelson is currently pursuing an MFA in creative nonfiction at Vermont College of Fine Arts after spending years teaching French and writing for several newspapers and magazines. She lives in Hopewell, New Jersey, with her three teenagers.

Was Whitney Houston mentally ill?

This was covered a bit in this article, which makes reference to the book, A Legacy of Madness: Recovering My Family From Generation of Mental Illness.

Here is the Huffington Post reference: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-davis/imperfect-lives_b_1282309.html.

Here are the Wiki Answers:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Was_Whitney_Houston_mentally_ill

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_Whitney_Houston_very_ill

From The Huffington Post: Whitney Houston And The Perfectly Imperfect Life

Growing up, I wanted to be the greatest at whatever I did, the guy who'd rise above the troubles of my family. I wanted to become the Muhammad Ali, even the Whitney Houston, in my corner of the world.....Read more on The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-davis/imperfect-lives_b_1282309.html

Best depression treatment after doing a book tour for "A Legacy of Madness? Sad about what happened to Welcome Back Kotter's Juan Epstein? Try writing

I talk a lot about depression treatment in my book, A Legacy of Madness: Recovering My Family From Generations of Mental Illness.

Being away on a book tour for two weeks, I felt like I needed it. I missed home. I missed my wife and kids. I missed seeing trees with empty branches, houses with solid bricks and winter skies filled with snowflakes.

When I got home came another "whammy." I talk a lot about growing up in the 1970s, and there's nothing to make you feel older than to hear that Welcome Back Kotter's Juan Epstein, otherwise known as Robert Hegyes (a fellow Metuchen, N.J. resident, by the way), die of a heart attack.

I felt like I was just starting to get to know the guy. He's a celebrity in Metuchen, a native of this place where he went to school before he hit stardom. We just friended each other on Facebook; he was "in a relationship" with somebody, and I checked on her, too (her wall was blocked, unfortunately, so I'll never know).

Again, feelings of melancholy creeped in. I started to feel like I was on the plane again, impatiently waiting for every hour to pass until I could feel the descent into JFK Airport. I started to feel my palms sweat, as I usually do when I get nervous.

Or when I start to feel as old as I am, or even older.

The one thing I was asked often, at every stop I made - which included a stop at the Jimmy Carter Library (speaking of the 1970s) in Atlanta, where Rosalynn Carter greeted me - was: "How do you get through it? How do you deal with those feelings when they start to come on."

My best answer is here, and what I'm doing write now: Writing.

Writing is the best release of the soul. It's the outlet that allows your mind to problem-solve. It gives you the challenge of a puzzle, finding the right words to express your grief. After you express it, you still may feel like you don't have the right words.

So you read them again. And then you rewrite, and maybe rewrite again, until the sentences, the paragraphs take on the right form and shape.

You start to remember the reasons why you feel the way you do. You start to remember that whatever makes you feel depressed probably once gave you such joy.

I remember being 8 years old, and my sister telling me about this cool new show called "Welcome Back Kotter." I was pretty young for it, but I wanted to try it anyway.

I remember it being so different from what I've seen before. Sure, there was "All in the Family," and shows like it. But there were few that matched the sense of humor of the kids I knew from school. There were few shows that took on the form and shape of the juvenile life I knew.

Somehow, even in second and third grade, when I was going to an elementary school in Point Pleasant, N.J., I could find a kid like Barbarino, Horshack, Washington and Epstein. The show always made me feel at home, even after John Travolta hit stardom and the show "jumped the shark" creatively.

As I write this, I'm reminded about what makes me feel young again. That's what writing does - that's why I wrote the book about my family; that's why I traveled to Atlanta and San Francisco to promote.

And that's why, as silly as it may seem, I'm writing about Juan Epstein. Because Epstein, like writing, is an extension of my soul.

Going to California to promote "A Legacy of Madness"

The list of events can be found here: http://www.goodreads.com/event/list_user