I tell Natalie I’m not calling 911 until she sends the thank-you note for yesterday’s job interview. I tell her, “I’d rather die from a heart attack knowing you sent that email.”
She tells me I sound like the people who stayed at their desks on 9/11, and she dials 911 herself. Read more
Yiyun Li’s older son, Vincent, killed himself in 2017. He was sixteen. She wrote a book about him. Her younger son, James, killed himself in 2024. He was nineteen. She wrote a book about him too, and that one won this year’s Pulitzer Prize. Read more
Dewey vs. Truman (The Great Debate) by Norman Rockwell (1948)
People go to marriage counseling because they think their partner doesn’t understand. But your spouse understands you just fine; they just don’t like what they understand. They don’t like that the thing they’ve explained to you forty times has somehow failed to turn you into a different person. Read more
Last week I wrote about Lindsay Clancy’s postpartum psychosis. I was excited about the case because the mental health profession would be challenged. Now, after two weeks of reading transcripts and listening to testimony, I think I missed the most important thing: motive. Her husband, Patrick, was having an affair and three weeks after the killings he vacationed with his girlfriend in Costa Rica. Read more
Lindsay Clancy is on trial for strangling her three children, but her lawyers are putting the mental health system on trail. Clancy had three psychiatrists prescribing medicine at the same time. She had twenty prescriptions simultaneously. One of the prescribers had never had a postpartum psychosis client. Another did not know Clancy had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. All the prescribers could have looked at Clancy’s records and they didn’t. Read more
Parents think an evaluation is a moment of truth: you pay an expert, the expert gives you answers. That’s not what happens. Most evaluations are designed to tell you as little as possible. Here’s how it works:
1. When a school tests your kid, that’s not really testing. Even the most high-functioning autistic kid is very, very expensive for a school district, because that kid has the right to so many extra services. Schools don’t like to spend money on one kid. So schools do the bare minimum: test for a narrow range of issues and default to “your kid is fine” unless the kid is disrupting the classroom. Read more
Two years into Z’s head injury we went to a pain clinic. The program was for families with a teenager in chronic pain, and people flew in from all over the country. Z was the only musician who couldn’t play music anymore. But there was an all-state field hockey player who hadn’t played in years but still went to every practice. There was a girl who’d been a ballerina her whole life and then suddenly couldn’t dance: she’d grown half a foot, and now her body was built for basketball. Her proprioception was off and now movement felt like violence. Read more
Once you know your personality type, you read what you’re bad at and you think: so what? That’s how you know it’s your type. The thing other people think is your weakness is, indeed, your weakness. In their eyes. Because it’s important to them. It’s not important to you. Read more
When I was a kid my parents divided the house into rooms for cleaning. Two kids, two parents, twelve rooms: three rooms each. Nobody did their rooms, so I did them all. With no parents home between 8am and 8pm, I had to do something remarkable to get their attention. Read more
I ran a study at Harvard and published a paper. But my best finding is sitting on Harvard’s server, unpublished. So I’m embarking on a furtive rescue mission. To start, here’s the finding: Read more