Bøker av Sue Westwind

Born into a family full of shame and secrets about their legacy of mental illness, Sue Westwind received her own set of labels when she ran away from home in 1969. Depression, anxiety, migraines, and chronic fatigue grew worse as she grew older. The story could have ended there: a lifetime spent taking prescription drugs to treat her myriad list of illnesses. But an open mind and a desire to heal led Westwind to an extraordinary body of research. She learned that our toxic Earth plays a dangerous role in the human epidemic of bad moods and violent behavior.The concept that the body's travails strongly affect the mind is given lip service but not invited to take part in a badly needed overhaul of the mental health system. Yet it is given serious thought in the world of autism, where many parents lead a charge so successful that professionals take notice. For Westwind, adopting an infant girl later diagnosed with autism changed her life forever. Nina is a child so baffling that at first Westwind wonders if she can parent her. But in her quest to heal her daughter she learns about nutrients, the gut-brain connection, epigenetics and environmental toxins. Armed with this understanding, the path she strides to heal her daughter becomes her own.After a pivotal visit to a premier nutritional clinic for mental and behavioral disorders, Nina is cured of seizures and set on a detailed nutrient course. But this is not the story of Westwind's daughter. It is the story of a mother's transformation fueled by her search to heal her daughter. Their journey together changes Westwind into a person who can finally claim energy, clarity, and optimism.Lunacy Lost looks at madness from many angles as Westwind lives the theories that rise and fall over time: blame the parents, anti-psychiatry, feminist critique, and spiritual healing. Written as an environmental memoir in the manner of Body Toxic (Susanne Antonetta), Westwind explores her bloodline's persistent depression and psychosis-and their adopted children's behavior disorders-to reveal that mental health is not all in the mind. Lunacy Lost: A Memoir of Green Mental Health advocates an approach that welcomes body, spirit, and concern for the environment into discussions of psyche and suffering.

When author Sue Westwind marries at midlife and moves to sixty acres of prairie woodland, she imagines that her life will now be fulfilled in ways she has always longed for. Yet the man she marries is ultimately buffeted by life's cruelties and loses the passion for her that once had assured her their union would always be idyllic.As her husband grows silent and distant both from her and the land they live on, she finds erotic fulfillment in the swells and folds of the earth itself, in trees and creeks, in deer and stones. She awakens to the land erotic, and in her ever-expanding and intimate connection to it, she discovers a kind of earth-based sexuality that rejuvenates her and give her strength to endure.This is a book of profound honesty and self-reflection, and this is writing that is exquisitely lyrical, placing Sue Westwind among the very best writers today whose bedrock subject is land and how we live upon it. If you have ever loved a piece of land-or wanted to-you must read The Land Erotic."In The Land Erotic, we live Sue Westwind's marriage and life with an intensity, a richness and rhythm of language, and a therapist's empathy that brings to mind the thunderclap insights of robust poetry and music. Westwind's erotic connection to her sixty acres of woods and prairie is as sensual as any "ecosexuality" I've read. The "healing erotic touch" of her land-"her partner in the real marriage"-runs parallel with her marriage to her husband, where harsh words "deflated love one micro-puncture at a time." "How do you separate husband and place?" she asks. She trusts the land, where the forest teaches her forgiveness. In this story, we trust her. - Stephen Trimble, author of The Mike File: A Story of Grief and Hope and co-author of The Geography of Childhood"In a deeply personal memoir that is marked by uncommon honesty, Sue Westwind tells the story of the home and family she created on sixty acres of Midwestern woodland with her husband and two daughters. No other writer-female or male-has written about land transformed into lover with this kind of candor and with a lyricism that will take your breath away." - Russell Martin, author of Beethoven's Hair, Out of Silence, and The Sorrow of Archaeology