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Amy Ellis Nutt

Amy Ellis Nutt is a former science writer on the national team of The Washington Post and the author of three books, including two New York Times’ bestsellers: “Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family,” and “The Teenage Brain,” with Frances Jensen. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing in 2011. She is now a full-time author and is currently working on her fourth book, for Random House, called “American Madness,” a narrative history of mental health treatment in America.

Nutt has taught at Columbia and Princeton Universities and was a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard in 2005-2006.

Categories: Author and Writer, Health Care, Health Care - Mental Health, Addiction and Recovery

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Videos

Topics

Born into the wrong body: What it means to be transgender in a male/female world: It’s all in the brain

Although more and more transgender people are in the news, there is still little understanding of the “who” and the “what.” As a lay expert on the science of being transgender and having written a New York Times bestseller about it, “Becoming Nicole,” Amy is in a rare position of making sense of the science for those grappling with the concept. Being transgender is not about aberration; it’s about variation and is a function of genes and hormones when the fetus is still in the mother’s womb.

Off the rails: How our mental health system has spiraled out of control and what we can do about it

No drug taken today for a mental illness does anything more than treat symptoms. No cause for any mental illness has yet been uncovered. And no truly novel antidepressant has been discovered in 40 years. At the same time, 66 percent of the counties in the United States have neither a psychiatrist nor a psychologist, 70 percent of all psychiatric drugs are prescribed not by a psychiatrist but by primary care physician and only 10 percent of the seriously mentally ill can afford or find psychotherapy. Multiple studies, however, have shown that psychotherapy, which managed care has nearly driven to extinction, is a more effective tool in the treatment of depression and anxiety.

ADDITIONAL TOPICS

*Science Writing
*The Art and Craft of Journalism
*How Human Evolution Created us to be Storytellers: How this particular trait, perhaps more than any other, offers the best tool for successful communication and understanding, whether on a personal or public level.

Books

Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

The inspiring true story of a transgender girl, her identical twin brother, and an ordinary American family's extraordinary journey to understand, nurture, and celebrate the uniqueness in us all, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter for The Washington Post When Wayne and Kelly Maines adopted identical twin boys, they thought their lives were complete. But it wasn't long before they noticed a marked difference between Jonas and his brother, Wyatt. Jonas preferred sports and trucks and many of the things little boys were "supposed" to like; but Wyatt liked princess dolls and dress-up and playing Little Mermaid. By the time the twins were toddlers, confusion over Wyatt's insistence that he was female began to tear the family apart. In the years that followed, the Maineses came to question their long-held views on gender and identity, to accept and embrace Wyatt's transition to Nicole, and to undergo an emotionally wrenching transformation of their own that would change all their lives forever.

You can purchase this book here