Dr. Sawyer is a Yale clinical faculty member, a psychologist in practice for almost forty years, and the author of the prize-winning book, Smoking Cigarettes; Eating Glass: A Psychologist’s Memoir, the book she worked on for ten years and was awarded the 2013 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards nonfiction Grand Prize.
As speaker, she has addressed clinical groups around the country regarding use and misuse of psychiatric diagnosis, the high cost of stigma and shame in mental illness, and the power of human connection to heal. She seeks to diminish the stigma of mental illness by speaking to clinical audiences around the country, using herself as a case study.