Antonetta is a poet and writer whose work deals with psychiatry, madness, and science. The Devil’s Castle looks at German and American eugenics, including the T4 program in Nazi Germany that was the blueprint for concentration camps, within the larger framework of psychiatry — and from her perspective as someone with lived experience with bipolar and psychosis.

This is a hard book to read but one we can’t ignore, certainly not now, not when things are happening here that parallel things that happened in our own country’s history and in Germany shortly after the Nazis took power.

The next time you or someone you know decides to move into a sanist or ablieist stance in order to, ironically, show your support for other groups of marginalized and oppressed people,* think again. Please think again. Think about this history, this present, and the future we’re headed toward if we keep moving from one form of discrimination to another rather than examining and addressing all our biases.

Where we discriminate against one, we discriminate against all.

* One example I’ve seen is folks who support, or want to be seen as supporting, trans rights and who use sanist language to do so, that is, characterizing anyone who doesn’t support trans rights as mentally ill. That’s not going to cut it. That’s doing more harm. That’s a sign you’re performing what you’re saying, not feeling it or living it.

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Images: 1. The Devil’s Castle standing perpendicular to my desk with a dried pomegranate, a horse sculpture, and an hourglass. 2. A page from the book. 3. A page from the book in which Antonetta discusses here first manic episode. 4. A photo of the book lying flat on my desk with the dried pomegranate, the horse sculpture, and the hourglass.