I Thought I Was The Crazy One

Ruthie O. Grant Ph.d. aka Amorah is a psychologist who lives in Los Angeles, a single mother divorced from a husband she labels as a toxic personality. Her I Thought I Was The Crazy One is a very California, LA-land book.

Part I is 201 examples of things to beware of about people, with a thought per page including one or more quotes. Part II discusses toxic personalities, citing a fair amount of recent, and not so recent, literature. (Rather more worryingly, this includes L Ron Hubbard’s The Causes of Suppression though, to be fair, none of the points cited from Hubbard seem silly or sinister.) Part III is about recovering from relationships with one or more toxic personality.

Part II and III are reasonably informative, useful summaries. Part I, by its sheer number of points, is likely to have something that hits home. (I did find a few confronting.) The book is more of a quick primer than any sort of profound or enlightening work. Clearly aimed at the quick-and-easy end of the self-help market. But it is grounded in the relevant psychology and it may well have a useful niche as a first introduction to the notion of toxic personalities and their effects.