Welcome to Readerzz!
Today we’re kicking off a new series on The Devil’s Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry’s Troubled History Reverberates Today with Susanne Paola Antonetta.
Susanne is an award-winning poet, memoirist, and essayist whose work explores consciousness, mental illness, neurodiversity, science, and what it feels like to live inside an unusual mind. In this book, she takes us into one of the darkest chapters in medical history, but she also asks a deeply human question: what happens when we decide which minds are normal, healthy, or valuable?
In Part 1, we begin with consciousness itself, the early history of psychiatric care, the rise of eugenics, and the lives of Paul Schreber and Dorothea Buck. We talk about psychiatric diagnosis, humane care, the mystery of the mind, and how easily people can be reduced to symptoms, cases, or labels.
But this episode is also about resistance. Pinel listens instead of punishing. Schreber writes his way back to freedom. Dorothea Buck survives a system that tried to erase her future and spends the rest of her life fighting for more humane care.
At its heart, this episode is about amor mentis, love of the mind, and what changes when we meet minds we do not understand with curiosity instead of fear.
Enjoy!
