You know how hard it is, when you’re sitting with the psychiatrist, to suss out the right diagnosis for your problem, or a loved one’s, so you can get the insurance company to cover the treatment?
Never happened to you? That comes as a surprise, because, as Michelle Obama recently wrote, “roughly one in fifive adults—more than 40 million Americans—suffer from a diagnosable mental health condition like depression or anxiety. These conditions affect people of every age and every background: our kids and grandparents, our friends and neighbors.”
That descriptor, “diagnosable,” is at the heart of Claudia Kalb’s delightfully mistitled new book, Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder: Inside the Minds of History’s Great Personalities. The cartoonish title is an indirection, but one carried out with grace, to lead an unsuspecting reader to another truth about mental illness: it is treatable.