Because I Come From A Crazy Family: The Making Of A Psychiatrist
Whew! What a show this one was with Dr. Edward “Ned” Hallowell and our host, Kristin Sunanta Walker. Even our editors were inspired after listening to this one!
When Dr. Hallowell was eleven, a voice out of nowhere told him he should become a psychiatrist. A mental health professional of the time would have called this psychosis. But he took it in stride, despite not quite knowing what “psychiatrist” meant. With a psychotic father, alcoholic mother, abusive stepfather, and two so-called learning disabilities of his own, Ned was accustomed to unpredictable behavior from those around him, and to a mind he felt he couldn’t always control. The voice turned out to be right.
Because I Come from a Crazy Family, tells the often strange story of a childhood marked by what he calls the “WASP triad” of alcoholism, mental illness, and politeness, and explores the wild wish, surging beneath his incredible ambition, that he could have saved his own family of drunk, crazy, and well-intentioned eccentrics, and himself.