her to take, and she emerged from her second psychosis much the same way she did her first: with the aid of meds. She returned home after 33 days, still intermittently psychotic but mostly under control. She didn’t talk about the devil or the universe anymore, but, once again, she was barely there, lost in depression and a chemical fog.

During her recovery Giulia attended group therapy, and sometimes her friends from that group came over to our place. They’d sit on our couch and commiserate about how much they hated their pills, their doctors, and their diagnoses. This made me uncomfortable, and not just because they nicknamed me the Medicine Nazi. Their conversations were informed by the anti-psychiatry movement, and that movement is founded on the idea ofFor three centuries, the Romanov Dynasty ruled Russia and its vast empire. In 1613, when the Romanovs assumed power in Moscow, the House of Stuart ruled in England and the Capetian Dynasty lorded over France. The Romanovs, beneficiaries of the cultural and economic backwardness of Russia, long outlived these European rivals, which fell before the muskets of the English Civil War and beneath the guillotines of the French Revolution. They survived Napoleon’s armies, palace intrigues and assassinations. They mercilessly stamped out all revolutionary threats, their armies drowning in blood the Revolutions of 1848 in eastern Europe, and their Cossacks and Black Hundreds unleashing savage repression on all opposition within the empire, as well as against Russia’s Jews.

The Romanovs condemned to the gallows scores of revolutionaries, including Lenin’s older