The Becoming, Nicole Luongo
The Becoming, Nicole Luongo
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
Club: $14.99

The Becoming

Author: Nicole Luongo

Narrator: Lauren Vandenbrook

Unabridged: 9 hr 7 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: ECW Press

Published: 06/15/2023


Synopsis

The Becoming is a brutal account of mental illness by a woman who doesn't believe in mental illness. As the author embarks on a PhD at the University of Oxford, a lifetime of addiction, eating disorders, and trauma culminates in an explosive hospital stay that sees her achieve liberation through psychosis. Her journey from terror to acceptance is grueling, and she makes meaning of it by weaving reflexive narrative with classic and nascent scholarship. Part phenomenological recounting, part social critique, the text disrupts biomedical approaches to altered states by exploring their emancipatory potential. It also illuminates how conventional mental health treatment pathologizes human suffering. In doing so, The Becoming contributes to anti-psychiatry and Mad studies projects, each asking, "What does it mean to be normal?" and "Should we be sane in an insane world?"

Reviews

Goodreads review by Amy on December 05, 2021

I'm an avid reader and also happen to be a recovering addict who has spent a considerable about of time in treatment centres and pyche wards. Luongo's memoir was painfully accurate for me in recounting how so-called madness abounds in the places meant to treat it. While tracing her own trajectory th......more

Goodreads review by Medāneghā́ʼ Detʼele on November 26, 2023

Very insightful and honest. The transparency Nicole shows in this book is immense and I appreciate how she navigates describing her experiences and how those may land with differing theories without necessarily fully agreeing with them. Or at least that was how I read it. A very good read for people......more

Goodreads review by Zay on July 07, 2023

If I were in charge of every social work/health care/drug policy/counseling/social work etc etc program in Canada, I'd make this memoir required reading for all faculty and students, to rock them out of their paternalism and to learn. Luongo anchors her own experiences in some very deep social-polit......more