THE TRUE HAPPINESS COMPANY

Breaking away.

When Dinavahi was an overachieving sophomore in high school, a friend in her math class took her own life. The tragedy was the latest in a series of incidents at Severna Park High, a Blue Ribbon school in Maryland with a suicide epidemic so severe that when Dinavahi was admitted to a psychological ward after her own suicide attempt, she ran into a classmate she presumes was there for the same reason. Dinavahi continued attempting to take her own life throughout her teens. Desperate to keep her daughter alive, Dinavahi’s mother took her to see a man named Bob Lyon, who ran the True Happiness Company (the names are pseudonyms). Although he was a former ophthalmologist with no background in psychology, Lyon diagnosed Dinavahi with borderline personality disorder and said that the only way for her to stop her self-destructive behavior was to speak to him daily. Over the course of the next decade, Lyon insidiously took over Dinavahi’s life, manipulating her into dropping out of college, getting married, and joining the Mormon church. It was not until Lyon molested Dinavahi that she found the courage to leave. “Sometimes conformity can be a protective mechanism,” she writes. “If everyone is heading in the same direction, you figure someone must know what they’re doing. They can’t all be wrong. But this overwhelming psychological pressure to conform kept me in True Happiness for so long, doubting my own instincts.” Dinavahi is a talented writer with a dark sense of humor. Her intensely vulnerable storytelling vividly illustrates the ways in which society preys on the insecurity of neurodiverse women and, in particular, neurodiverse women of color.

A brilliant, personal take on the pernicious power of cults.