In The Gentling of Hanna Johansen: A Betrayal of Trust, Dr. Alexa Muybridge, Hanna Johansen’s psychiatrist, adopts a “gentling approach” to engage her fifteen-and-a-half-year-old patient via remote-therapy “Zoom” calls in trying to decipher the root source(s) of her debilitating, self-destructive behaviors that have become alarmingly life-threating, leaving her distraught parents (and prior therapists) with little choice but institutionalization or extended confinement in a RTCT (residential treatment center for teens). But Hanna, being her precocious, rebellious “my-way-or-the-highway”-Self, demands an alternative to either option: a “visit” with her “Grandpa Andy” in his “retirement cabin” deep in forests of rural New Hampshire.
What can best be described as an adolescent’s contemporary “Gothic experience,” The Gentling of Hanna Johansen is an expose written in the immediacy of a multigenerational family psycho-social drama in the post-COVID world of gender controversy, parental controls, teachers’ ideological agendas, conflicted relationships, and exposure to a persistently pernicious Internet. With suicide rates among teens and tweens climbing to the leading cause of death among ten-to-twenty-four-year-olds, this novel is likely the first ever to unveil the cumulative, detrimentally socio-psychological effects clearly portending America’s looming mental health crisis afflicting the minds of our youngest and most vulnerable netizens at their most critical developmental stage.
What’s so remarkable about this novel, among many unique features, is that Hanna Johansen is not only the co-author and central character, but also the victim, with each iteration of her-Self simultaneously reliving “the betrayal” and its aftermath over and again as different personas of her pre-traumatized Self which splits into many “Hannas.” Her Identity, that which she once knew as “Hanna,” is nothing more than a collection often feuding Hannas over which she has little or no control leading to her erratic, self-destructive, angry and spontaneous attempts at self-annihilation.
The antidote (to this psychological Castle of Otranto in her cranium) is Andy Collins’s isolated, lakeside cabin and surrounding forests, and a chance encounter with a Native American (Algonquin) boy, Nyke Roundhill. That, and Hanna’s extraordinarily perceptive and persistent young psychiatrist, Alexa Muybridge, who councils Hanna remotely via Zoom sessions from her office in Boston and who cautiously guides Hanna, and the readers, to the grave’s edge in the frightful exhumation of her betrayed Self and the inevitable, long-anticipated endgame: “asphyxiation by submersion,” the same method used by her alter ego to end her life. Hence, Hanna’s “Ophilia Complex” and her obsession with water as a transparent reflection of her many Selves….
The stereotypic, standard-fare “gothic” trappings of old are cleverly repurposed here in this intensely candid drama of teens daring each other to take a walk on the wild side, to push the envelope of risk-taking, to play “Game of Thrones” with their latent multiple personalities, and to suffer from the betrayals of lost loves and the ghostly predators living off them.
PTSD PRESS
Contact: www.ptsdpress.com
Publisher: PTSD PRESS www.ptsdpress.com
Genre: Historical Fiction, Psychological Thriller, Family Drama, Coming-of-Age
Date of Publication: April 17, 2026
ISBN: 978-9-697592-11-1 (Paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-971659-23-7 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-1-971659-24-4 (Hardcover)
Pages: 361
CONTACT: author@ptsdpress.com
Also Available in Spanish: El Amansamiento de Hanna Johansen: Una traición a la confianza. On AMAZON BOOKS.