7 Shrinks: 60 Years in an Undiagnosed Altered State

by Carol Prisant

Imagine going to sleep one night as yourself—the emotional, anxious person you’ve been all your life—but on awakening, not being able to recognize your face and body in the mirror. No longer feeling empathy, joy or love. But feeling no anxieties at all.

Imagine being afraid you’ve gone insane, and living in terror that all who know you might find out. Imagine trying to describe your ‘altered state’ to a succession of doubting psychiatrists.

And now imagine that lasts for sixty years.

**

Carol Prisant lives in Manhattan with an almost-embarrassing, but beloved. three-pound dog, and she writes. But she used to be, in no particular a page at a library—when there were pages and people used libraries—a model, an antiques dealer, an appraiser, and a restorer of old houses. For the past 31 years, Carol has been the New York editor of the UK magazine, The World of Interiors. She’s authored three books of Antiques Roadshow Primer (a New York Times best-seller); Antiques Roadshow Collectibles (the companion volume); Good, Better, Best (the connoisseurship of antiques) plus Dog House (a tender memoir) Catch 26 (a novel) and Seven Shrinks (a not so tender memoir).

215 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 26, 2021

Reviews

[Jill Meyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

“7 Shrinks: Sixty Years in an Undiagnosed Altered State” is a quasi-memoir by the late Carol Prisant. She died at the age of 82 this year after living a life under the cloud of an undiagnosed mental issue. She saw seven psychotherapists over the years, which also included two or three stays at mental hospitals. She underwent electric shock therapy in an attempt to cure what ailed her, the exact disease remained unknown til relatively shortly before her death.

I didn’t particularly care for Prisant’s book. It was written in a style - memoir-novelish - that I found difficult to take seriously because i was never sure if the conversations she recounts are supposed to be verbatim. Hell, I can’t even remember what I said this morning! And what she writes about her life and it’s struggles swing back and forth between “TMI” and “WTF”.

Carol Prisant led an interesting life, particularly when spent under the cloud of mental illness. She married young - right out of college - and had a child. She was suicidal at times and couldn’t have been easy to live with. But she made a success of her life, becoming an expert on antiques and a writer for a British shelter magazine, “World of Interiors”. She wrote a couple of novels and a decorating book. I finished the book and honestly questioned what I had read and why I bothered to read it.

It’s one of those books that I urge anybody interested in it to read all the reviews. Just because I thought it was “meh” doesn’t mean you will, too.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Carol Prisant is a dazzling writer and I've followed her since I came across an article about her distinctive and beautiful Manhattan apartment (was it in our shared favourite magazine - "World of Interiors"?). So I discovered that, as well as having style and wit, she shared my love of classical music and of the Aubrey-Maturin novels of Patrick O'Brian.

But now I read that, as a young woman, she suffered from extreme anxiety with neurological results:

"Imagine going to sleep one night as yourself—the emotional, anxious person you’ve been all your life—but on awakening, not being able to recognize your face and body in the mirror. No longer feeling empathy, joy or love. But feeling no anxieties at all."

We accompany her through six decades of expensive and frustrating psychoanalysis by uncomprehending "shrinks" before her condition was diagnosed. However Ms Prisant doesn't describe continuing to "feel no anxieties at all", certainly not about her family or air-travel.

A wrenching but fascinating read.

[Liz Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wonder how many well-written and fascinating books like this one there are in the world, and how few of them see the light of day. I was alerted to the existence of this one by a writer friend. It was a Kindle special—99 cents for one day only—and I couldn’t put it down. Prisant writes authentically and with vivid recall of her lifelong experience as a person with Depersonalization Disorder, a condition of which I knew nothing. It is not only a moving journey through one woman’s life, but also a social history of women and of psychiatry in the 20th century.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Miss Carol. Taken from us too soon.