Acquainted with the Night

Advance Praise for Acquainted with the Night

“Acquainted with the Night is an outstanding guide to the experience and treatment of bipolar illness in children. It lays out the confusing, harrowing, tumultuous, painful, and exhausting journey that children and their parents make with this awful but treatable disorder. Raeburn provides an enormous amount of useful information about diagnosis and treatment. He importantly also provides hope.”
—Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and author of An Unquiet Mind

“This memoir, the first ever written from a father’s point-of-view, is an unflinching look at the impact of a child’s mood disorder on a family. It’s all here: the confusion over ever-shifting diagnoses, the unbearable fears for the child’s future, the gradual estrangement of a well sibling and spouse, and the corrosive sense of powerlessness and guilt. And yet—through it all—the reader learns that the past is not a place of unredeemable mistake, but a chapter to be lived through and survived. This powerful memoir is a testament to love, hope, and endurance and, as such, is an important addition to the literature on mood disorders in the young.”
—Demitri Papolos, M.D., and Janice Papolos, authors of The Bipolar Child

“This is a frightening, upsetting, gripping book that vividly describes a parent’s encounters with despair as he attempts to save his two children from a diabolical mental illness.”
—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“Acquainted with the Night provides readers with the rare opportunity to see within the world of a father struggling to understand the experience of mental illness that afflicts two of his children. Raeburn’s background as a science writer and editor for Business Week creates the foundation from which he explores the illnesses of his children. However, the candor with which he expresses his own grief and suffering is what moves the reader into a fuller understanding of the profound impact mental illnesses can have on a family.”
—Rosalynn Carter, former. First Lady of the United States and chairperson, The Carter Center Mental Health Task Force

“This engaging, hones,t and well-written book deals with an important and, sadly, all-too-common family problem.”
—Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia


“I could not put Acquainted with the Night down. I found it a riveting portrayal of a family ravaged by mood disorders and an unflinching assessment of the self-doubt and blame that can split a family asunder.”
—Martha Hellander, J.D., executive director, Child & Adolescent Bipolar Foundation

PAUL RAEBURN was formerly a senior writer and editor at Business Week, where he covered science and medicine for seven years. He is the recipient of many distinguished writing awards and is also the author of Mars: Uncovering the Secrets of the Red Planet and The Last Harvest: The Genetic Gamble That Threatens to Destroy American Agriculture. A native of Detroit, Raeburn lives in New York City with his wife, the writer Elizabeth Devita.

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