Asylum
Subtitle: Hollywood tales about my great depression : brain dis-ease, recovery, and being my mother's son
By: Joe Pantoliano
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 260
ISBN-13: 9781602861350
Subjects: Actors; Biography; Depressed persons
Description: Most people know Joe Pantoliano from his memorable roles in The Sopranos, The Matrix, The Goonies, Risky Business, Memento, and The Fugitive. But before he became one of Hollywood's most successful character actors, he was "Joey Pants" from Hoboken, the son of a fiercely controlling schizophrenic mother. Growing up, Joe always knew something was different with him, too. "It was as if I was born with a huge hole inside of me," he writes. Not until much later in life was Joe diagnosed with clinical depression. Now he has a message for the millions of people who suffer from mental illness, and for the friends and family who care for them: You are not alone.  Before Joe was diagnosed he tried to fill the hole inside of him with alcohol. Then he stopped drinking because the alcohol had stopped working, and instead took up to twenty Vicodin a day in an effort to numb his emotional and physical pain. Even after being diagnosed Joe faced roadblocks, such as when he couldn't get insured on a film because of his antidepressant medication.  This is the story of Joe's Hollywood success, his undiagnosed mental illness and substance abuse, and how that all led to his eventual awareness, diagnosis, recovery, public activism, and advocacy. Interweaving deeply personal experience with informative discourse, he creates a memoir that will resonate not only with victims of mental illness, and witnesses to its devastating effects, but the general reader curious about the working of the human mind.
Notes: Includes index.
Table of contents: title: No kidding, me too!; title: Abandon all hope for a better past; title: Lying for a living; title: An egomaniac with an inferiority complex; title: Let the shame begin!; title: The hunchback of Hoboken; title: If it ain't one thing it's your mother!; title: The monkey was off my back, but the circus was still in town; title: These are the good old days!; title: Stuck on stupid; title: The great depression; title: Twelve steps out of the mile square; title: An open letter to the late, great Frank Capra.