Bøger af Sarah Krasnostein

How can we mend Australia's broken mental health system?Around one-fifth of Australians will suffer from mental illness in any given year. And the pandemic is making things worse, especially in schools. Our mental health system is under stress and not fit for purpose. What is to be done?In this brilliant mix of portraiture and analysis, Sarah Krasnostein tells the stories of three women and their treatment by the state while at their most unwell. What do their experiences tell us about the likelihood of institutional and cultural change?Krasnostein argues that we live in a society that often punishes vulnerability, but shows we have the resources to mend a broken system. But do we have the will to do so, or must the patterns of the past persist into the future?

For Sarah Krasnostein it begins with a choir on a subway platform, a fleeting moment of witness that sets her on a fascinating journey to find out why people need to believe in absolute truths and what happens when their beliefs crash into her own. Some of the people Krasnostein interviews believe in things many people do not. Ghosts. UFOs. The literal creation of the universe in six days. Some believe in things most people would like to. Dying with dignity and autonomy. Facing up to our transgressions with truthfulness. Living with integrity and compassion.By turns devastating and delighting, and captured in snapshot-vivid detail, these six profiles with a death doula, a geologist who believes the world is six thousand years old, a lecturer in neurobiology who spends his weekends ghost hunting, the fiancé of a disappeared pilot and UFO enthusiasts, a woman incarcerated for killing her husband after suffering years of domestic violence, and Mennonite families in New York will leave you convinced that the most ordinary-seeming people are often the most remarkable and that deep and abiding commonalities can be found within the greatest differences.Vivid, unconventional, entertaining, and full of wonder, Krasnostein interweaves the stories of these believers with compassion and empathy, exploring our universal need for belief to help us attempt to make sense of life, death, and everything in between

Sarah Krasnostein spent the last four years in Australia and the US meeting people holding fast to belief, even as it rubs against the grain of more accepted realities. Krasnostein talks with her trademark compassion and empathy to these believers - and finds out what happens when their beliefs crash into her own.