Women in crisis: what Medea and Phaedre teach us about mental illness
Ancient texts have a cosmic way of speaking to people in our time: for instance, a New York woman who killed her two children, and my mother, who killed herselfPascale, my daughter's school director, first told me about Lisette Bamenga's case one morning during pre-school drop-off in Brooklyn. Lisette was Pascale's own daughter's third-grade teacher at Public School 58, and she was facing lifetime imprisonment for ki…