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Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Antonella Gambotto-Burke Books

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“Classifying depression as an illness serves the psychiatric community and pharmaceutical corporations well; it also soothes the frightened, guilty, indifferent, busy, sadistic, and unschooled. To understand depression as a call for life-changes is not profitable. Stagnation is not a medical term. The 17.5 million Americans diagnosed as suffering a major depression in 1997 were mostly damned. (Psychobiological examinations confuse cause and symptom.) Deficient serotonergic functioning, ventral prefrontal cerebral cortex, dis-inhibition of impulsive-aggressive behavior, blah blah blah: the medical lexicon boils emotion from human being. Go take a drug, the doctor says. Pain is a biochemical phenomenon. Erase all memory.”

PainSufferingEmotionBehaviorDoctorsMemoryIllnessDrugsHuman BeingGpsPsychiatric CommunityDisinhibitionImpulsive AggressionMajor DepressionBiochemical PhenomenonCause And SymptomMedical LexiconPharmaceutical CorporationsPsychobiology
Book:The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide
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“Privileged women continue the tradition of compensating for their authority to men through affectations of disablement – from dieting and other disorders to substance abuse, institutionalised detachment from their children, and so on.”

WomenFeminismAuthorityPrivilegeAttachmentPatriarchyDetachmentElitePatriarchalStatus Anxiety
Book:Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine
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“The light in that room was a glow; I seem to remember the color green, or perhaps flowers. A pale green sheet covered his inert body but not his head, which lay (eyes closed, mouth set in a tense and terrible grimace) unmoving. Gianluca. Barely able to see, barely able to stand - my knees kept buckling – and breathing so quietly I thought that I, too, might die; that out of shock, I would just drift away, the shell of my body cracking open. No longer anchored by my brother’s love, I would be reabsorbed by sky. Gianluca. If there was never another sound in the world, I would understand – yes, that would be appropriate, it would be fitting. This was the antithesis of music, the antithesis of noise. My brother’s death seemed to demand silence of all the world. Gianluca.”

LossGriefDespairDepressionHeartbreakSuicideMourningBereavementIdentificationMorgueAsphyxiationSibling LossViewingGassingHelium Suicide
Book:The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide
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“The intensity of this cultural shame demanded a poster boy who would deter ‘bestial’ human behaviours and presentation, and so to the genesis of Satan, ‘the beast’ – a carnal, hairy, lascivious, malevolent, stinking satyr capable of taking sexually suggestive serpentine form: the humanising of the mammalian self.”

ChristianHumanityEvilChristianityShameSatanThe DevilThe BeastAbrahamic ReligionsBeelzebub
Book:Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine
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“My brother was philosophically impaired, emotionally paralysed and stubborn, but he was not mentally ill. Mental illness suggests some kind of biological maladjustment such as that caused by injury or drug-induced chemical imbalances, whereas my brother, like many male suicides I have known, reacted normally to an abnormal situation. My brother felt he could not show the suffering that revealed him as sensitive; to do so would have threatened his gender status. It was easier for him to die.”

DeathSufferingDepressionSuicideMental IllnessToxic MasculinitySibling Suicide
Author:Antonella Gambotto-Burke
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“These associations, between childbirth and feminine effacement, and between feminine silencing and violence, would, for the first time, become imprinted on the subconscious in relation to birth, creating, in place of passionate and proud attachment, a terror-based antipathy between mother and child, and between the feminine and its biology.”

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Book:Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine
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“The impact of obstetric drugs on the human race cannot be overemphasised. Globally, 500,000 deaths result from illegal drug use, and over 70 percent of these deaths are opioid-related. In 2018, some 58 million people around the world were known to use illegal opioids; the unknown number would be significantly higher. Between 2010 and 2018, the number of fatal opioid overdoses in America increased by 120 percent. Fentanyl and other drugs used in an obstetric context were involved in two-thirds of these deaths; in 2018, there were over 31,335 deaths involving fentanyl and other synthetic narcotics alone.”

BirthPatriarchyDrugsOverdoseOpioidsObstetricsFentanyl
Book:Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine
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“The relationship between obstetric drugs and sometimes ultimately fatal intoxication in adulthood is not accidental. Through amniotic fluid, the foetus develops a taste for the foods his mother prefers; this transmission is thought to assist the transition to nursing and, after weaning, to solids. The same transmission of preference applies to substances, meaning that a pregnant woman who drinks or uses drugs passes the preference to her foetus. Logically, this principle applies to the placental transference of obstetric drugs.”

BirthAddictionAlcoholLabourPregnancyDrugsObstetricsObstetriciansMidwives
Book:Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine
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“What this suggests is that ‘widely used’ obstetric and infant drugs such as phenobarbital dysregulate the infant’s dopaminergic (dopamine-activating) system, permanently reducing his potential for pleasure and creating an imbalance he later seeks to redress through dopaminergic compulsions – substance-use disorders involving drugs such as cannabis, heroin, or LSD, say. Or sexual addiction. And, while the nature of pornography is determined by the culturally sanctioned birth abuses of mothers and babies, the impact of pornography is determined by the susceptibility created by drugs given to mothers and children.”

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Book:Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine
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“Given that observable neurobehavioural characteristics in adulthood are determined in part by GABA-A receptors in early life, and the impact of GABA-acting drugs during pregnancy – in particular, on the construction of the brain – have been said to lead to ‘a cascade of pathogenic consequences’, it’s clear that the long-term effects of phenobarbital regularly administered during infancy would be severe.”

BirthAddictionPregnancyDrugsInfancyOpioidsObstetricsGabaObstetricPhenobarbital
Book:Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine
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“It started off very underprivileged, but got more affluent.' Amis suddenly smiles to himself, remembering a moment with his father. 'I remember saying – I'm very interested in class, generally – when I was going to this grammar full of Old Etonians – I remember asking my father if we were nouveau riche, and he replied: 'Well, we're very nouveau, but not very riche.' Which is about the size of it.”

ClassClass WarfareEtonAspirationalNouveau RicheMartin Amis
Book:The Martin Amis Interview
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“The mythicised inhumanity of this attack remains unforgettable not only because it was performed by one mother on another mother – one dark and distorted, the other fair and privileged – but because it encoded the relationship between patriarchal masculinity, drugs, and the resulting – and accelerating – cultural denigration of the feminine and maternal.”

FeminismMurderFeministMotherhoodPatriarchyDrugsMansonCharles MansonMother WoundSharon Tate
Book:Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine
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“In the 21st century, the pornographic vogue of ‘ass to mouth’, in which the feminine, after being sodomised by the masculine, is expected to orally clean the penis, is an eroticised example of the same impulse. Women, who for centuries have metaphorically eaten shit, are now expected to literally do so, like swine.”

FeminismFeministSexismPornographyBrutalityAtmPornographicAss To MouthSexual Brutality
Book:Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine
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“Feminists, in vivid essays praising Shulamith Firestone’s legacy, fail to mention this emphatic celebration of incest and paedophilia; had she been male, she would not only have been dismissed by the same women on these very grounds, but her legacy would have been cancelled”

FeminismRadical FeminismIncestCancel CulturePaedophiliaFirestoneShulamith Firestone
Book:Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine
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“Time is ungovernable, but grief presents us with a choice: what do we do with the savage energies of bereavement? What do we do with the memory - or in the memory - of the beloved? Some commemorate love with statuary, but behavior, too, is a memorial, as is a well-lived life. In death, there is always the promise of hope. The key is opening, rather than numbing, ourselves to pain. Above all, we must show our children how to celebrate existence in all its beauty, and how to get up after life has knocked us down, time and again. Half-dead, we stand. And together, we salute love. Because in the end, that's all that matters. How hard we loved, and how hard we tried.”

LoveDeathLossDepressionSuicideMemoryMourningBereavementGrief Inspirational
Book:The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide
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“All this was in contrast to the idea that a newborn, on the basis of cortical immaturity, is a being who remembers and understands nothing: a person only within the context of the mother’s acknowledgment, blank, a species of human cabbage.”

ChildhoodBabyMotherhoodMeaningInfantInfancyNewbornMaternal LoveMaternal Influence
Book:Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine
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“Secret elisions within families are suddenly revealed by self-execution, and just as quickly sheeted with excuses, blame, and counter-blame. But sense is made of the world only through relationship between action and reaction, symptom and cause. No change is possible without analysis of accountability.”

ActionBlameSuicideAnalysisAccountabilityExcusesFamiliesCauseReactionSymptomSelf ExecutionCounter BlameSecret Elisions
Book:The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide
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“Heart-Shaped Glasses (When the Heart Guides the Hand), the first single from Eat Me, Drink Me, features a video filmed by Titanic director James Cameron. In it, Manson croons to Wood, who – with bobbed hair, gloves and a demure frock – blankly masturbates in an audience of writhing lesbians, Manson’s image reflected in her heart-shaped glasses. I wanted to like the song, but found Manson’s threadbare voice and overdubbed music annoying, and the chorus - 'Don’t break my heart/and I won’t break your heart-shaped glasses' – suggested a pugilistic retribution ('Dump me, and I’ll punch your lights out!') more in keeping with Norman Mailer than Nabokov.”

LolitaMarilyn MansonDita Von TeeseJames CameronMusic VideosEvan Rachel WoodHeart Shaped Glasses
Book:Mouth
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“Ninety-six per cent of juvenile prostitutes are fugitives from abusive domestic situations; 66 per cent began working before they turned 16. (Prostitution is their only perceived means of survival.) Millions of children work as prostitutes around the world. A third are male. One study revealed that over 50 per cent of prostitutes are the children of alcoholics or substance abusers, and 90 per cent are deflowered through incest or rape. Ninety-one per cent of prostitutes do not speak of the abuse. (The truth of life is told through the language of behavior.) Abused children suffer Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, guilt, self-destructive impulses, suspicion, fear. Seventy-five per cent of prostitutes attempt suicide. (Imagine their scrapbook of memories.)”

FearSlaveryGuiltSuspicionRapeProstitutionIncestPost Traumatic Stress DisorderProstitutesAbused ChildrenSuicide AttemptsChildren Of AlcoholicsSelf Destructive ImpulsesJuvenile ProstitutesParasuicideSubstance Abusers
Book:The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide
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“In the absence of any therapy, the mentally ill of the 20th century were chained, shackled, straitjacketed, kept nude, electrocuted, half-frozen, parboiled, violently hosed, wrapped in wet canvas, confined to “mummy bags”, subjected to insulin-induced hypoglycemic comas, forced into seizures with massive doses of the stimulant Metrazol, injected with camphor, drugged into three-week comas with barbiturates and tranquilizers, involuntarily sterilized, and surgically mutilated. Rape by hospital staff was common, as was humiliation and verbal abuse. One reporter noted that a state hospital patient had been restrained for so long that his skin was beginning to grow around the leather straps.”

PainAbuseMental IllnessPatientsInstitutionalizationTorturesMental Hospitals
Book:Mouth
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“What amounts to a plague of mental illness is now addressed as ‘normal’ rather than as an indication that there is something terrifyingly wrong with our culture. The fact that we no longer understand mental illness as a message – that is, as a nondeclarative communication of an imbalance that requires rectification – not only demonstrates the degree of our emotional illiteracy, but our failure to understand the principle of balance as the axis of all existence.”

BalanceMemoryMental IllnessImbalanceDysfunctionWestern CultureDysfunctional FamiliesDesensitizationNormalizationNeuroses
Book:Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine
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“The likelihood of my baby being injured during co-sleeping was, in reality, significantly lower than it would have been had I left her in the hospital cot. In the UK, 90 percent more babies die alone in baskets or cots – Sudden Infant Death Syndrome – than they do when they securely, rather than hazardously, co-sleep with their mothers.”

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Book:Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine
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