Mark Vonnegut
The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for biographies. Please help to establish notability by adding reliable, secondary sources about the topic. If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources: "Mark Vonnegut" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR · free images (January 2015) This article relies too much on references to primary sources. Please improve this article by adding secondary or tertiary sources. (January 2015) This article may contain improper references to self-published sources. Please help improve it by removing references to unreliable sources, where they are used inappropriately. (January 2015) This article may rely excessively on sources too closely associated with the subject, preventing the article from being verifiable and neutral. Please help improve it by replacing them with more appropriate citations to reliable, independent, third-party sources. (January 2015) Mark Vonnegut Occupation Pediatrician, memoirist Nationality American Alma mater Swarthmore College, (1969) Harvard Medical School Genre Memoir Notable works The Eden Express Relatives Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Edith Vonnegut Mark Vonnegut (born May 11, 1947) is an American pediatrician and memoirist. He is the son of writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and his first wife, Jane Cox. He is also the brother of Edith Vonnegut and Nanette Vonnegut. He described himself in the preface to his 1975 book as "a hippie, son of a counterculture hero, BA in religion, (with a) genetic disposition to schizophrenia." [page needed] Mark Vonnegut (whom his parents named after Mark Twain ) graduated from Swarthmore College in 1969. He briefly worked at Duthie Books and was also briefly chief of a 20-man detachment of special state police that provided the security for Boston State Hospital. During the Vietnam War, he filed an application with the draft board to be considered a conscientious objector, which was denied. After taking the psychological examination, he was given a psychiatric 4F classification and avoided conscription into the U.S. military. [page needed] During his undergraduate years, he set out to become a Unitarian minister. He eventually abandoned that goal. :33 He is the author of The Eden Express (1975), which describes his trip to British Columbia to set up a commune with his friends and his personal experiences with schizophrenia, which at that time he attributed to stress, diet and in part, drug use. The book is widely cited as useful for those coping with schizophrenia. During this period, he lived mainly at the commune at Powell Lake, located 18 kilometers by boat from the nearest road or electricity. On February 14, 1971, he was diagnosed with severe schizophrenia and committed to Hollywood Hospital in Vancouver. :37 Standard psychotherapy did not help him, and most of his doctors said his case was hopeless. Vonnegut first attributed his recovery to orthomolecular megavitamin therapy and then wrote The Eden Express. Vonnegut does not presently attribute his recovery to vitamins. He subsequently studied medicine at Harvard Medical School and later came to the conclusion that he actually had bipolar disorder. He is currently a pediatrician in Quincy, Massachusetts. Vonnegut published his second book, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, in 2010. Like The Eden Express, it is autobiographical.