Men Have Called Her Crazy

Have you ever had a label stick to you—an adjective tossed off in anger or fear—that quietly decided what you deserved? In Men Have Called Her Crazy, artist and writer Anna Marie Tendler argues that the labels placed on women’s emotions—especially anger, panic, grief, and ambivalence—are too often pathologized, misread, or punished, while the systems that provoke them go unquestioned. Tendler contends that reclaiming sanity isn’t about becoming less emotional; it’s about seeing your anger, terror, and tenderness as information, learning the skills to hold them, and setting boundaries where institutions or intimates refuse to see you clearly.

This memoir tracks a year-plus descent into acute suicidality, self-harm, and disordered eating, followed by a voluntary eight-day stay at a psychiatric hospital (with a surprise epilogue weekend after a destabilizing outtake meeting), and the slow work of rebuilding. It’s also a reckoning with gendered power: early sexual encounters with older men who should have known better, a cosmetology year spent in a rock musician’s house, a wealthy boyfriend with money-as-power, and a later love called “soulless and godless” for saying out loud what many women feel about men and patriarchy. Throughout, Tendler weaves in the ballast of friendship, craft, and one stubborn French bulldog named Petunia—love and grief in a single warm body.

What This Book Argues

At its core, the book offers three contentions. First, sanity is relational: environments, clinicians, and loved ones either make your distress coherent—or double it. Second, skills beat stigma: practical tools from Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)—like cold-water plunges for panic or mindfulness for rumination—work better than shame. Third, your story belongs to you: diagnoses and doctors matter, but you still have to decide what explains you, what helps you, and what you’ll refuse. Tendler’s return to the hospital after a jarring outtake session (and her decision to fire her longtime therapist the next morning) embodies this agency-in-action.

What You’ll See Inside the Hospital

You enter the routines of Dalby House, a female residence on a campus shared with male and co-ed units: vitals twice a day, grab-and-go dinners, wrap-up meetings, and the unexpected consolations of Swiss Miss packets, Cool Ranch Doritos, and Billy Bob Thornton’s Goliath on the TV. You meet Caitlyn (eighteen, dimples and optimism), Mary (twenty-three, future lawyer vibes), Kristin (tattooed, plain-spoken, back for a third thirty-day rehab), and Shawn (edgy, brilliant, guarded violinist). There’s horticulture therapy with a hardy Cuban oregano plant; a Rock Ceremony sending friends to sober living with stones engraved HOPE and, for Shawn, PEACE; movement classes with a slightly mystical teacher and an audience of wild turkeys. The campus becomes a map of small rituals that re-teach dignity—the laboratory where affection, boundaries, and humor make survival feel less theoretical.

A Gendered Lens on Diagnosis

Tendler places her psychological testing and the final report from the lead psychiatrist under a microscope. She nailed verbal comprehension (91st percentile) and abstract storytelling, froze on arithmetic and sequencing (anxiety flooding reason), and drew a Rorschach of women entwined by energy fields and maps of Paris—and, yes, a lot of vaginas. The doctor’s case write-up, however, used hedged phrases (“Anna denies…”) and supplemented “anger management difficulties” with terms like “intermittent explosive disorder.” It even floated a redirection of her rage toward “maternal figures” as if patriarchy were a decoy. Tendler asks what many women have asked since nineteenth-century “hysteria”: is it her emotion—or the frame—that is disordered? (Compare: Kate Manne’s Down Girl on policing women’s moral standing; Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind on staking your narrative inside psychiatric care.)

Skills, Not Shame

A major throughline is DBT in the wild. You watch a panic attack yield to the “ice-water bowl” trick (a TIP skill) and a tough group dynamic with a man named Eric (who introduces himself with “my bitch ex-wife” and then, grudgingly, goes to the gym) become material for mindfulness, “check the facts,” and compassion. You hear Rumi’s “The Guest House” reframed as a daily practice: let sorrow and meanness in, honor them, and release them. And you observe how craft—first as the lampshade-maker, later as the photographer of her own survival—can be a distress tolerance skill, too (Marsha Linehan, DBT’s creator, famously stitched skills from her own pain; Tendler stitches them from lampshade trims, vintage fabrics, and the click of a camera shutter).

Why This Matters to You

If you have ever white-knuckled your way through heartbreak, been told your grief was “too much,” or felt mis-seen by a clinician or a lover, Tendler’s voice reads like a letter from your future self. You learn how to intervene in panic (ice water), how to honor rage without letting it run you (naming patriarchy while sparing yourself the scorch), how to leave a trusted therapist who can’t see you anymore (and not collapse), how to sit beside a dying pet and still let her go, and how to rebuild a life with more making, more friends, and fewer apologies. The book’s thesis is radical in its ordinariness: your feelings are not proof you’re broken; they are guides. The work is to hold them—with skills, with community, with craft—while you make a life sturdy enough to carry them. Men may call you crazy. You don’t have to answer to that name.

Tendler’s hospital chapters are the opposite of lurid: they’re domestic. You see beige walls, a carved HOPE sign, the confiscated iPad, a tiny blue notebook, and a hunger so keen it elevates a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos into sacrament. She chooses Dalby—women only—because she can’t bear to be around men. What she finds are rhythms that restore personhood: morning goals, gratitude videos, art therapy scribbles that become three snakes, and a Mexican oregano cutting that will outlive the week.

Rituals That Add Up

There’s a script for wrap-up meetings (you share how many days clean, feelings via a laminated wheel, and day goals). Gratitude circles sometimes land wrong—Tendler wants to scream when peers praise people who “didn’t desert me” while those same people absorb the tornado of addiction. She breathes instead. When an AA speaker named Betty confesses she lost her wife to cancer and daughter to addiction, then celebrated twenty-five years sober, Tendler softens. “Not long after my daughter died,” Betty says, “I celebrated twenty-five years sober.” That sentence suspends the room; the women sit in its gravity. Even Tendler—cynical that day—lets herself be moved.

Friendship as Treatment

You meet four housemates who become a brief coven. Caitlyn (eighteen) writes LOOK UP on her plant cup—the volleyball mantra that doubles as a life instruction. Mary (twenty-three) dreams of law school and means it. Kristin has done rehab here twice already and knows which cookies are best. Shawn is flint: wary, brilliant on violin, and—when she’s ready—funny. They eat grab-and-go with Oscar House men but cluster together at their own table. They gossip about the private Carlyle House and its chef (“Rich people and celebrities go there and pretend they’re getting help,” Kristin snorts). They watch Goliath like a secondary language. They celebrate a new kettle for tea like Christmas morning.

Small Groups, Big Shifts

Movement therapy asks them to “be a tree,” which Tendler declines in favor of “small fern” until she realizes that, while a fern avoids wind-whip, it’s easier to step on. Horticulture therapy is a hit: the Cuban oregano is “hard to kill,” Sandy the horticulturist says—so is Tendler. She spaces three equal clippings in perfect symmetry (“maybe I’ll go crazy if they’re uneven”), then writes NEW YEAR on her bead bracelet as a rebellion against her own prediction of a “bad year.” In a Rock Ceremony for Kristin, she struggles to say much—she’s the new girl—but learns how little and honest is enough. Before Tendler leaves (the first time), she picks a FREEDOM rock for herself. She can’t do the ceremony; it would feel like forcing others to say nice things. The private rock is permission: you can claim what you need without spectacle.

A Scare, Then a Choice

The outtake meeting implodes. On Zoom with her outside therapist, Dr. Karr, and the hospital team, a taut vibe escalates to “perhaps we need a divorce,” then to an insinuation that Tendler had “those men wrapped around your finger.” Tendler flees, then pulls into a church parking lot, calls Dr. Philips (the psychologist who had treated her like a thinker all week), and drives back. “It was the right thing to do,” he says. She stays the weekend; the house rejoices. Later she ends her five-year therapy with Dr. Karr in a short, dignified call—until the therapist adds, “You really know how to work a room of men.” Tendler says nothing, hangs up, and lets the insult sit where it belongs: outside her.

What you can use

Make tiny rituals sacred; treat peers as medicine; allow one sentence (“I celebrated twenty-five years”) to reset your nervous system; and if a meeting injures you, park, call someone who sees you, and go back for yourself.

When Tendler sits for three and a half hours of testing with Dr. Philips—the psych who puts her on a creaky colonial settee first, then at a bland table upstairs—she encounters herself with clinical clarity. She’s fast on block design, imaginative on the Rorschach (“two women making pottery, connected at the heart chakras”), strong on vocabulary, and flooded on math. Her story-telling test pulls women forward: a farm girl leaving home for school, a poet above a European city, a cloaked figure that stalks a woman’s periphery. The picture that forms is not “crazy”; it’s coherent. High conscientiousness. High neuroticism. Anti-extrovert. A person who “loses center” under anxiety, not a person who can’t reason.

When Reports Rewrite You

Months later, she reads the official report from the program’s psychiatrist, Dr. Samuels—the one who will write the diagnosis line that follows her file. The phrasing feels like a switchblade: “Anna denies symptoms of mania…” (Why “denies” instead of “does not present”?) “Aggression managed with difficulty,” “liability to explosive outbursts,” a suggestion that her readiness to reject men might mask deeper rage at maternal figures. Then: generalized anxiety, major depression…and “intermittent explosive disorder” and “borderline personality disorder.” Neither diagnosis was part of the collaborative discussions she experienced during the week. Neither has been borne out since, her current therapist will later say.

Hysteria’s Modern Echo

This is not a story of “bad doctor vs. good doctor.” Samuels catches her real suicide risk (sky high) and argues bluntly that a dog’s precarious health cannot be the sole tether to life. At the same time, Tendler names what many women feel in psychiatric spaces: centuries of cultural sediment settle on your chart. The nameless “hysteric” of the 1800s becomes today’s “explosive” or “borderline” woman when anger at patriarchy, misdiagnosis, or boundary violations gets reframed as pathology. (Compare: Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady on history’s gendered asylum; Kate Manne on how women’s moral anger is delegitimized.)

Refusing the Frame Without Refusing Care

Tendler doesn’t reject psychiatry; she rejects what misnames her. She accepts medication (Zoloft changed her life “comically fast”), leans into DBT, and lets numbers describe real constraints (conscientiousness in the 98th percentile means perfectionism is a live wire). But she also discards terms that aren’t hers. After the “men wrapped around your finger” insult, she fires a therapist she once loved. She keeps the doctor who speaks to her like a colleague. She keeps the skills that work. She keeps the plant. That, the book suggests, is what agency looks like inside care: not pretending you can heal alone, but declining to be cured into someone you are not.

What you can use

Ask clinicians to put their impressions in your words; request collaborative language; notice hedges (“denies”); and if a label steals more oxygen than it gives, set it aside and keep the practices that help you breathe.

If you’ve ever Googled “how to stop a panic attack,” you’ve met DBT’s spirit. Tendler shows the method as lived culture, not just acronyms. You see mindfulness in the rec center with a teacher whose flow looks like interpretive dance; distress tolerance when she’s doubled over from a rupturing ovarian cyst and breathes until she can walk; interpersonal effectiveness in not confronting Shawn out of anxiety; and emotion regulation when she chooses silence over a TV debate she can’t yet hold.

The Ice-Water Bowl: Panic Heist

In one of the book’s most useful scenes, Tendler’s DBT therapist coaches her through a phone panic: fill a bowl with ice water, put the phone on speaker, and dunk your face three to five times, holding as long as you can. The mammalian dive reflex slows your heart rate and interrupts physiological panic. After, text your friends to come over. They bring Doritos and cookies. Panic passes. Your nervous system hasn’t learned you’re doomed; it has learned that cold helps and friends arrive. (DBT calls this TIP; if you want the theory, look up “parasympathetic activation” and “vagal tone.”)

Mindfulness That Isn’t Precious

The hospital teacher invites them to “be a plant”; Tendler becomes a fern, then decides ferns get stepped on. Later, in outpatient DBT, when classmates share weekend skills wins, a man named Eric turns mindfulness into Jon Bon Jovi lyrics. It’s a perfect storm for Tendler’s contempt. Instead, she tries “check the facts,” reframing: nine hours a week for twelve weeks is finite; I don’t know his story; gym is a real skill. She texts the therapist about quitting; the therapist reframes the group as exposure therapy for men. She stays, not because Eric deserves it, but because she does.

Letting Guests In, Letting Guests Go

Rumi’s “The Guest House” becomes her scaffolding: emotions are visitors, not verdicts. She reads a stanza on Zoom while Petunia snores so loudly classmates laugh. Instead of getting embarrassed, she swivels the camera to show the dog: “She’s very cute.” In doing so she normalizes having a life—and a loud dog—inside therapy. That, too, is emotion regulation: making space for the un-ideal without deciding you’ve failed.

Tiny, Tactile Anchors

Bracelets that say NEW YEAR; a necklace that reads extraordinary machine (Fiona Apple as thesis); a Cuban oregano that survives the pandemic; a rock that says FREEDOM. These are more than cute—tactile cues reduce cognitive load when you’re flooded. A plant by the window might remind you that “hard to kill” is a trait you share. A word on a rock can cue a choice in a moment when your limbic system makes choices for you.

What you can use

Memorize TIP (cold); write a mantra on something you’ll touch; treat group as gym for your triggers; and when possible, laugh—mindfulness with a grin is still mindfulness.

Tendler’s relationship chapters read like a syllabus on power. At fourteen she cuts for the first time while the adults in her world fight epic, public battles. In high school, a popular senior grinds on her through shorts while she’s wearing a pad and then ghosts her at Abercrombie. Soon she’s meeting band guys in Poughkeepsie, texting a twenty-three-year-old named Brian (she’s sixteen), and making out in a car until a cop’s headlights flood the windows. The taboo is thrilling; the man’s ethics feel nonexistent. She later flies to Los Angeles at seventeen to sleep with a twenty-eight-year-old touring musician, Sam, who fills the condom with water “to check for holes” and laughs that the age of consent in California is eighteen—“so maybe, like, don’t tell anyone about this.”

Money As Mood

In her early twenties, she dates Theo, a newly minted multimillionaire. He is goofy and generous—Japan trips, Hamptons shares—but money becomes the air that decides who breathes easy. Rachel, his aspirational friend, polices Tendler’s class status and flirts via inbox. Tendler finds the emails; Theo laughs it off. At Narita Airport, she explodes—“you are a FUCKING LIAR”—and they sit in silence for fourteen hours. After the breakup, he has her repay a $2,000 makeup class by cutting his hair for free fifty times, marking down $40 a visit on a piece of paper in his desk. That image—the ledger—says a quiet part loud: for some men, debt is control.

The Soulless-And-Godless Fight

Years later with Reece, a younger man, she voices her fear that having a son might be harder for her than having a daughter, given what she feels and sees in men. He calls it “misandry” and later reports his female friends say her views are “godless and soulless.” At breakfast, she places $50 on the table and walks out. He later admits he made up the phrase. The apology matters; the worldview mismatch remains. They break up on FaceTime in late December after a fight about Joan Didion’s feminism morphs into an argument about texting. This time, Tendler resists making herself smaller to fit; she names what does not work and leaves.

Choosing Yourself (With Evidence)

With Javier, the camera-ready enigma who wears a white chore coat and drifts like a poem, the old pattern flares (fast attachment, pain at withdrawal) but ends differently. When he resurfaces months later, she meets him, spots his paralysis on small choices (which sandwich?), and realizes she wants friendship, not a life. “Do I want him?” becomes the new question, the anti-chasing prompt. That is the hinge of the book’s romantic arc: your longing is real, but it isn’t a reason to contort. You can end a story you’re still crying about. (See also: bell hooks’s All About Love, which argues that love without justice is not love.)

What you can use

Audit power (age, money, fame); believe the ledger someone keeps; don’t debate your humanity at breakfast; and practice asking, “Do I want this?” as often as “Do they want me?”

When devices are locked away at intake, a familiar mental noise is replaced with sentences, paragraphs—narration itself. Tendler starts writing, then making: at home she will make Victorian lampshades so meticulous the first good one glows like peacock velvet; in the hospital she’ll bead a bracelet that says NEW YEAR; after discharge she’ll photograph herself in a snowstorm, rainbow burst stitched on her jacket like a target: I exist. As exhibitions mount (she becomes the highest-grossing guest artist at The Other Art Fair), art shifts from hobby to income, but it keeps its first job: keeping her alive.

Craft Against Catastrophe

Tendler is a maximalist—wallpapered ceilings tiled like Guastavino, haunted Victorian dollhouse vibes, no overhead lighting, only lamps she designed. That attention becomes refuge. During one meltdown she watches the snow line her Connecticut yard, sees herself sitting in it in her mind, then stages the photo. Later, she beads a choker that reads extraordinary machine (Fiona Apple’s song becomes thesis and permission). These are not distractions; they are meaning-making. (Psychologists often note: icon-making and ritual are “bottom-up” regulation—the hands calm the brain.)

Boundaries at Work

One harrowing chapter at a Men’s Italian Vogue shoot is a masterclass in creative boundaries. Hired for basic grooming, she’s berated for not producing a long curly wig “like this” (a torn reference photo waved in her face). She runs to a beauty supply, returns with synthetic extensions, and endures the director burning plastic on a curling iron, screaming, “You have ruined this entire shoot!” Tendler finishes the job and leaves with a vow: never again on set as makeup/hair. That clarity creates space for the art that fits. Boundaries—like skills—can be made of velvet and fringe.

Home As Studio, Studio As Self

Her home becomes an installation of protection. The English oak dining room with a thirty-foot ceiling and a cuckoo clock holds dinners lit by “too many candles to be safe.” The kitchen table holds three Cuban oregano plants (hers, Mary’s, Caitlyn’s) now planted together, “hard to kill,” watered weekly. The plant stand nearby holds Caitlyn’s jade. These objects aren’t trophies; they’re co-authors. They remind her that sturdiness is a practice more than a personality trait.

What you can use

Make something you can touch when words disintegrate; set one boundary that protects your craft; curate your space to coach your nervous system (lamp glow > overhead glare); and keep a “hard to kill” plant as a mirror.

Not all trauma explodes; some hums for years. A psychiatrist explains “strain trauma”—the background radiation of volatility when a parent’s rage or passivity is the weather of your home. Tendler’s mother is brilliant, creative, and explosive; her father is kind, musical, and quietly withdrawing. Family fights are public and often. At eight, she’s spanked and denied birthday cake for refusing a photo in front of visiting relatives. At an allergist appointment, her mother tells her not to check “depression” on the intake form. It’s not that anyone is a cartoon villain. It’s that a child learns to be good at silence.

Complicating the Story

Tendler is careful: her mother also sewed her clothes, drove her to school so she could sleep longer, read the entire Anne of Green Gables series aloud, and, later in life, transformed—silent retreat in Massachusetts; six weeks alone in India; a birthday book of her travel emails bound by her daughter. When Tendler was seventeen and screamed, “THIS IS WHAT IT FEELS LIKE,” her mother never screamed at her again. Love doesn’t erase harm; growth doesn’t erase history. The book asks you to hold both.

Spiritual But Earthbound

Meeting with the hospital chaplain underscores Tendler’s secular-yet-ritualistic path. She’s culturally Jewish, spiritually allergic to “God talk,” but honest about flow states (dance at eleven felt like God) and open to labyrinths, Rumi, and Reiki (the chaplain’s note: “blocked in head and throat chakras”). She’s skeptical of epiphanies as “divine downloads,” preferring psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s account of unconscious creativity surfacing during rest. The compromise is elegant: call it God if you like; call it flow if you don’t. Either way, you still have to practice.

Attachment In Practice

When her parents separate, her mother begs her to skip hangouts and keep vigil at home; she’s terrified of her own suicidal ideation. Tendler learns to be the soothing one. Years later, that skill becomes a trap in romance—pleaser, convincer, chaser. What loosens it is DBT plus practice saying no: to therapists who mis-see her, to wealthy boyfriends who keep ledgers, to apologies that ask her to be smaller. Attachment trauma isn’t cured; it’s managed like a once-daily plant watering. The point isn’t to forget; it’s to notice faster and choose differently.

What you can use

Name your weather (strain, not just shocks); hold two truths about caregivers at once; pick a practice that makes epiphany more likely (walk, write, beads); and water your attachments with boundaries.

Petunia, a French bulldog with bat ears and an iron will, is the book’s beating heart. She guards everything—pens, spilled coffee, floors where coffee once spilled. She never destroys the treasure; she just wants to own it. An animal communicator hilariously confirms this: Petunia says she has walked upstairs and stolen things, but she has never destroyed anything. True. She’s also “a star and a queen,” so, the communicator adds gently, she might not agree that she should be left home while Anna goes places.

Care As Vocation

Petunia’s medical chart is a novel: multiple pneumonias, two nose surgeries for her concave face, degenerative disc disease, severe allergies, a heart murmur, and one life lesson in the shape of a hot fireman who, upon hearing Anna called 911 during a suspected cyst rupture, walks Petunia, locks her back in her crate, and drops the keys right in her purse. Care is expensive—Tendler’s frank about privilege—and constant: hand-rolling food into tiny meatballs because Petunia refuses bowls; ear flushes administered around attempted bites; anti-nausea treats before car rides to the compounded-meds pharmacy in Brooklyn.

Death As Practice

When deterioration becomes clear (neurological decline, fur shedding, sleepiness, confusion), Tendler arranges an at-home euthanasia. They sit on the patio at sunset, Waxahatchee playing, bats throwing scalloped shadows, peepers singing. Tendler tells Petunia the house’s story room by room, the way you tell a child about the life you shared. A cheap clay paw-print kit fails; the vet will make one. Petunia needs the dose of a Labrador to let go—she dies as she lived: defiant. In the following weeks, Tendler builds an altar with dried flowers, butterfly wings from Halloween, collar, fur, and ashes in a carved wooden box. She worries Petunia’s soul hasn’t crossed and hires a healer; the next morning, the house is empty in the precise way of grief’s second day. It is unbearable and survivable. Both.

Love That Teaches Boundaries

After Petunia’s death, two kittens arrive (later three—Chimney, Moon, and Butter). Tendler keeps the watering schedule for the Cuban oregano. She eats dinner alone in the English oak room with “too many candles,” speaking to absence like it can hear. Grief doesn’t end; it refines. The dog who demanded meatballs and owned the living room pen becomes the teacher who leaves a paw print and the proof that you can let something magnificent go and still wake up the next day to a house where the sun lands on the floor “exactly where she used to sleep.”

What you can use

Plan a beautiful death when you can; make an altar; ask a healer if you need a ritual; and remember that caring for the living (kittens, plants, friends) is grief work, too.