Book Description
June was 9 years old when she came home from school and her schizophrenic mother met her at the door, angrily demanding to know, "Who the hell are you? What are you doing in my house?" In another family, Tess repeatedly saw her mother wait outside church then scream at family friends as the emerged, accusing them of spying on and plotting to kill her. Five-year-old Tess and her 7-year-old brother would just cry, begging their mother to take them home as onlookers stared. These are just two of the stories gathered for this book as psychotherapist Nathiel conducted interviews. The children, now adults, grew up with mentally ill mothers at a time when mental illness was even more stigmatizing than it is today. They are what Nathiel calls "the daughters of madness," and their young lives were lived on shaky ground. "Telling someone that there's mental illness in your family, and watching the reaction is not for the faint-hearted," the therapist says, quoting another's research. But, she adds, "Telling them that it is your mother who is mentally ill certainly ups the ante." A veteran therapist with 35 years experience, Nathiel takes us into this traumatic world--with each of her chapters covering a major developmental period for the daughter of a mentally ill mother--and then explains how these now-adult daughters faced and coped with mental illness in their mothers. While the stories of these daughters are central to the book, Nathiel also offers her professional insights into exactly how maternal impairment affects infants, children, and adolescents. Women, significantly more than men, are often diagnosed with serious mental illness after they become parents. So what effect does a mentally ill mother have on a growing child, teenager or adult daughter, who looks to her not only for the deepest and most abiding love, but also a sense of what the world is all about? Nathiel also makes accessible the latest research on interpersonal neurobiology, attachment, and the way a child's brain and mind develop in the contest of that relationship. Some of the major topics addressed include: BLFeelings of guilt in the child - Is it my fault? BLKeeping the secret BLRole reversal - when child acts as parent BLFear of the same fate BLBuilding resilience and accepting help BLInsights from daughters of mothers who were schizophrenic, psychotic, severely depressed, paranoid, and personality-disordered.
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Social Skills Training for Schizophrenia, Second Edition: A Step-by-Step Guide
Alan S. Bellack ,
Kim T. Mueser ,
Susan Gingerich , and
Julie Agresta
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ASIN: 157230846X |
Book Description
This popular manual presents an empirically tested format and ready-made curricula for skills training groups in a range of settings. Part I takes therapists and counselors step by step through assessing clients' existing skills, teaching new skills, and managing common treatment challenges. Part II comprises over 60 ready-to-photocopy skill sheets. Each sheet--essentially a complete lesson plan--explains the rationale for the skill at hand, breaks it down into smaller steps, suggests role-play scenarios, and highlights special considerations. Of special value for practitioners, the 8 1/2" x 11" format makes it easy to reproduce and use the practical materials in the book.
Book Description
A nationally known spokesperson for the mentally ill offers hope and inspiration in this moving story of his decades-long struggle with schizophrenia and his remarkable recovery.
For thirty-two years Ken Steele lived with the devastating symptoms of schizophrenia, tortured by inner voices commanding him to kill himself, ravaged by the delusions of paranoia, barely surviving on the ragged edges of society. In this inspiring story, Steele tells the story of his hard-won recovery from schizophrenia and how activism and advocacy helped him regain his sanity and go on to give hope and support to so many others like him.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent book.......2007-09-24
This book presents an incredibly honest insight into the experience of a paranoid schizophrenic. Ken Steele invites his readers into the most personal spaces of his mind and walks us through his life experiences. The book left me in tears. A must read for anyone who works as a mental health provider or seeks to understand what a friend or loved one is going through.
schizophrenia.......2007-06-08
The book writtten in a simple style, is nonetheless extremely moving. It was very interesting to read how a schizophrenic views the world around him, and how we appear to him. An excellent read.
Just Wonderful.......2007-04-10
I recommend this book to all people who want to understand mental illness better or to anyone who just needs to be inspired. Ken Steele gives you such a gripping and vivid picture of his extremely difficult life as a mentally ill person, I felt like I was experiencing it with him. Never before have I been brought to tears from reading a book, nor have I ever felt so much hope that I can overcome adversity in my own life.
Resonate and Inspiring.......2007-03-24
I chose to read `The Day The Voices Stopped: A Memoir of Madness of Hope' by Ken Steele and Claire Berman because I was interested in reading a book on the subject of mental illness. `The Day The Voices Stopped' is about Ken Steele's battle with schizophrenia; along with all the work he's done to better the care and treatment of mental health consumers. Before I read the book, I thought that the book would depress me, and that I would want to stop reading when some of the really bad parts came. But as I read, I got pulled into Ken's life. The bad parts still depressed me, but I kept on reading, desperately wanting to see Ken's happy ending. The book starts with the sudden arrival of Ken's voices; Voices that are constantly harassing and abusing him. Ken jumps from place to place, institution to institution, experiencing tragedy and joy. There are moments in the book when everything in Ken's life seems absolutely dismal, which makes his recovery and triumph over his illness all the more inspiring. The book doesn't stop on the day that Ken's voices stopped; it goes on to chronicle his advocacy for the rights of mental patients, and his struggle without the voices.
I found `The Day The Voices Stopped' to be very enjoyable. Ken bears all, not sugar-coating anything in his struggles. It's a hard, truthful look into the life of someone with schizophrenia], and someone who has been constantly abused both by his voices and people around him. Ken's story is moving and inspirational. It makes one stop and look around at the world with new eyes. The story is written for Ken's point of view, sharing both his thoughts and what his voices said. He retells his story in a detached sort of view, distancing the view from his emotions he's feeling while looking back on his life.
I highly recommended this book, but not to everyone. It is definitely not for younger kids, someone should be at least 15 if they are going to read this book. I highly recommend this book to anyone who knows someone with a mental illness and anyone who has a mental illness themselves. It really shows the thought process and emotions of someone with a mental illness, and helps us to relate to them better. I think it would be a good idea for a parent to read along with the book if their child is reading it, to help explain some things that the child might not understand.
The book is not meant to depress someone. It is meant to give people a window into the mind of someone who is mentally ill, to help them better relate to them, to offer hope. It's meant to move people without mental illness, and to inspire those who do have a mental illness, telling them that they can find their way out of the confusing fog in their minds. In sharing his experiences, Ken has given a voice to those who have been silenced.
A True Hero's Story.......2007-03-24
I chose to read this book as part of a group project at school. I was slightly apprehensive about the choice at first, but I finally decided to go for it and I'm glad that I did. "The Day The Voices Stopped: A Memoir of Madness and Hope" is the life of Ken Steele, told through his own words, about his struggles with schizophrenia. It details his journey from place to place, hospital to hospital and along the very edge of suicide. It describes the abuses he suffers in mental wards and how people took advantage of his position. It also describes his recovery and his life afterwards as a mental health advocate.
The book begins with the day the voices came to Ken. "The voices arrived without warning on an October night in 1962, when I was fourteen years old. Kill yourself.... set yourself afire, they said." I found this a very gripping way to begin his story. We get to see what happened from day one and what things the voices say to him from the start. I think that, by letting us in on all 32 years of his struggle, he lets us into a new way of thinking about mental illness.
I thought that the book and its content would disturb me, but it didn't disturb me at all. The only thing it did was make me think and question my own views on the issue, which I find to be a great quality in a book. The book is slightly depressing, but Steele does offer the reader rays of hope throughout the text to keep it from being one large pit of spirit lowering material.
The book helped me to develop my position involving the care and treatment of those with mental illness and helped me to understand mental illness better. He takes his current feelings out of the picture (most of the time) so that we focus on the moment and what he was going through at the time he's telling about and can understand the hardship mental illness brings to those who suffer from it and their families. I think that everyone should read this book, whether they have a direct connection with mentally ill patients or not, for this reason. "The Day the Voices Stopped" is a very eye opening book and lets us into the minds of the mentally ill so that we can have a better understanding of them. There is, however, some very adult content within the text so the book is not appropriate for children, and parents should also be there to discuss it if their teenager is reading this book. As a teenager, I felt that it was important to be exposed to this so that I don't form the wrong conclusions about the mentally ill and their care, and my parents agreed with me.
This is definitely a book that I would buy, if not for the educational value of it, but for the story itself. Ken's fight for sanity and his miraculous recovery thanks to a new line of anti-psychotics, and his later fight for rights for the mentally ill is an amazing story. I was constantly wondering where he would go, what he would have to deal with, and what the voices were going to tell him to do next. In exposing his story and sending out his voice, he has become a real hero for many people who have been silent for too long.
Book Description
" A brilliantly documented chronicle of young woman's long struggle with schizophrenia."
-- Willard Gaylin, The New Republic
"Sylvia Frumkin," highly intelligent young girl, became a schizophrenic in her late teens and spent most of the next seventeen years in anti out of mental institutions. Susan Sheehan, a talented reporter followed "Sylvia" for almost a year talking with and observing her listening to her monologues, sitting in on consultations with doctors, even for a period sleeping in the bed next to her in a mental hospital.
"Susan Sheehan has committed an extraordinary act of journalism....She brings relentless intelligent attention to bear on a particular case, a journalistic practice that almost always results in new and disturbing insights into those mindless generalities and prejudice and certitudes we tend to carry around with us." -- Meg Greenfield, front page Washington Post Book World
"Sheehan is tenacious, observant and unsentimental. The history of a single patient leads us into a maze of understaffed institutions, bureaucratic fumbling, trial-and-error treatment and familial incomprehension. Though Sheehan keeps herself invisible, her sympathy is palpable."
-- Walter Clemons, Newsweek
By the author of Lift for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair
Customer Reviews:
An exceptional piece of investigative journalism that is potently affective........2007-07-23
If the investigative reporter Nellie Bly were still alive, she probably would have declared Susan Sheehan to be her comrade-in-arms, journalistically speaking, at least, for so eye-opening is this book, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1983 in the nonfiction category, that one can't help but somehow feel indirectly involved in this true story in regards to time, place and manner.
By chronicling the schizophrenic oddesy of a single patient, "Sylvia Frumkin", a pseudonym, Susan Sheehan has performed an intimate piece of extraordinary journalism, whereby she brings the reader into the frightening and oftentimes misunderstood world of those possessed by mental illness. With compassionate, intellectual and keen, almost anthropological observation, Sheehan weaves through the blurred and confusing healthcare bureaucracy which "Sylvia Frumkin" and her family incrementally find themselves trying to navigate. Coupled with psychiatric doctors who seem tartly bent on competing against each other in regards to what drug perscriptions are best (and there is a flurry of them), a frazzled family who is so thinly glued together that a feather could crack them apart and "Sylvia Frumkin" herself, whose fragile mental health goes up and down faster than a blinking eye, a reader would want to toss the book aside simply because of the consistent up and down emotional tolls that are flatly patterned in each passing chapter. Yet, as each chapter occurs, it also provides a clean slate and or a new beginning where the illness can be kept at bay and "Sylvia Frumkin" can finally have the good normal life that she deserves. However, it is the rare bouts of normalcy that are fleeting and therein is where the loss of hope and frustration lie. It is that very fleetingness that is so expertly conveyed in, Is There No Place On Earth For Me?
Sheehan's book is one of those rare type of books, not simply because of its high journalistic caliber, but because it is one of those works that can actually bring about good, positive change in a very flawed system, and if a system, governmentally, medically and administratively speaking ever needed change, Creedmore Hospital and those of a similar ilk, definitely required serious correction. Sheehan's book was an eye-opening and engrossing read, amd one can only gravely echo Sheehan's own words in the afterword: "I want there to be a decent place for "Sylvia Frumkin"...and for the many thousands of other people like her."
Insightful and Well Written.......2007-01-09
Sheehan gives an objective and interesting view of schizophrenia and institutionalization. Her writing is funny and engaging.
The Revolving Door of Schizophrenia.......2005-05-01
Reading this book is like watching a train wreck in progress. You can't take your eyes off of it because you want to know how it all works out. When I was putting together a course on psychology in literature a friend gave me this book but made me promise to return it because it was a favorite of hers. After reading it, I can understand why. The author does a fantastic (although disturbing) job of describing the life of a woman with schizophrenia while also discussing the impact that the woman's illness has on her family. While reading the book the reader often begins to feel the anxiety and frustration experienced by Sylvia, a woman with schizophrenia, and her family, and can see in their mind's eye how the disease unfolds and engulfs their lives.
This is a great text for a student of psychology who is interested in descriptions of the disease and also of historical (1970s) views of the mental health system. It would also be helpful for the family members of a person diagnosed with schizophrenia to read so that they can have a greater understanding of the life of a person affected by the disorder.
nicely researched.......2001-12-30
but having read it just this year, it seems a little outdated. I would recommend this book as an introduction to the subject of mental illness, institutionalization etc., but if you know a little more on the subject, skip the book and read something else.
True, intimate, and slow.......2001-06-24
I think this book shows the reality of liveing with schizophrenia and the feeling that there is no place for you. This book takes you through relaspe and healing periods with the main women character. It also shows the failures in our system. I think the book gets a little slow at points, it is a book you can definately put down, but it does do justice to teaching and learning about life with schizophrenia.
Average customer rating:
- Does Anyone Have an Update on Lori?
- Powerful, Uplifting (and sometimes triggering) Account Of Schizophrenia
- Inside Their Mind - Distinguishing Teen Behavior from Psychological Torment
- Excellent!
- The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness
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The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness
Lori Schiller , and
Amanda Bennett
Manufacturer: Grand Central Publishing
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ASIN: 0446671339 |
Customer Reviews:
Does Anyone Have an Update on Lori?.......2007-09-25
I loved this book's depiction of mental illness and have re-read it several times. I am going to push a question that has been alluded to in past reviews. This book was published 11 years ago. Does anyone have any updates as to how Lori has been doing since then? Thank you very much.
Powerful, Uplifting (and sometimes triggering) Account Of Schizophrenia.......2007-09-23
The Quiet Room is a powerful account of a woman lost in her illness of schizophrenia. I was amazed at how the author, Lori, hid her hallucinations from people for so long before getting treatment. I found myself angry at her parents for denying her illness for so long and delaying treatment which she very much needed years before it was received.
It's also amazing that Lori made it through her experience of schizophrenia and was able to tell her story. During the worst of her illness, she was extremely suicidal at times and thought nothing of it (for example, playing a game of crossing the street again and again with her eyes closed and walkman blaring so she couldn't hear the cars). She could have easily died at those times and not come through to tell her story.
This book was very well written and made me feel for Lori. I couldn't put this down once I started. Although, I did give it a five star review and found it to be one of the most interesting books I've read, I don't necessarily recommend it to everyone.
At times this book was too well written, too many details and caused parts of the book to be triggering for me. I'm not schizophrenic (never have been), but I've been in hospitals for depression and other things. Lori's details of the "quiet room" (seclusion in the hospitals) and what happened to her when she was out of control in the hospitals was disturbing to me, as I've been in different "quiet rooms" in hospitals and I found myself remembering my own experiences and getting upset. Just because this was triggering for me, doesn't mean it will be for others. I'm just saying, you've been warned.
As triggering as this book was, it remains a five star for me. It was gripping, intense, real --just the way a book should be-- and I loved it. I liked the way the story was told through family members as well. It helps the reader see the perspectives of those who loved Lori. It shows how her illness affected others.
Overall, The Quiet Room is a sad book. But it's inspiring and uplifting at the end. If Lori can make it through the horrors of schizophrenia, we can make it through our day-to-day lives of work, school, and dilemmas. This book gave me hope.
Inside Their Mind - Distinguishing Teen Behavior from Psychological Torment.......2007-04-23
This book has changed my life. I am 40 years old. My mother is schizophrenic and my teenage daughter is now a hereditary statistic as she is also stricken with this terrible disease. I have always been the "informed" consumer and research everything that affects my life. Before my daughter began experiencing early onset of schizophrenia, I had dealt with my mother's illness extensively later in her life. I was with her during a psychotic break. I had the gut wrenching experience of processing a Baker Act through the courts to hospitalize her against her will. I engaged in productive and intelligent consultations with her medical providers. I thought I had this disease understood. I thought I knew...
The most unique and enlightening element of this biography is that the biographer began her life similar to my daughter's. Straight A student, gifted, very beautiful, popular, social, supportive & loving parents and an achiever in every way. So WHY does someone who has so much going for her sink so low? HOW can teachers, parents, siblings, friends distinguish symptoms of mental illness from common teen behavior and drama?
It is so easy to rely too heavily on the amazing new drugs that are currently available. We can easily, mistakenly feel a false sense of understanding and security. There is no cure for schizophrenia. There is no ONE pill that fixes ALL. There are a myriad of symptoms. There are hundreds of medications with hundreds of side affects. This book has given more insight than I could have ever dreamed in sorting all this out. After reading this book, my daughter and I are a team now. I really do understand. She is not just a badly behaved teen. She trusts me and I trust her.
She is only 14. She hears voices. They scream at her! She is being watched. She is in fear for her life.
We are in this together now with my having a clue - hearing her - perhaps for this first time.
Excellent!.......2007-03-09
I usually don't read books, but I was forced to read this one for an Abnormal Psychology class. This book kept me interested from beginning to end. It gave me a better understanding of schizophrenia. A must read for book readers.
The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness .......2007-01-10
A must read if you work in the Mental Health field or have family members with a mental illness.
Average customer rating:
- Unconditional dysfunctional love...
- Sympathy for the Devil
- Boyle wit and linguistic gusto
- Loved it with qualifications
- absolutely worth a read.
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Riven Rock
T.C. Boyle
Manufacturer: Viking Adult
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ASIN: 0670878812 |
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In 1905, Stanley McCormick, heir to East Coast millions, is most definitely mad. Heredity and an early, horrifying glimpse of his naked sister have rendered him schizophrenic, incapable of being around women--right down to his wife, Katherine, "a newlywed who might as well have been a widow." Not even the dawn of modern psychiatry can save him. Instead, he's barred and carefully cosseted in Riven Rock, the California estate he helped design for his sister, the first of the McCormicks to crack. Will the 31-year-old patient be cured? His wife, the first female graduate of MIT, believes that he will. So, too, does his loyal head nurse, Eddie O'Kane, a preternaturally articulate, handsome Boston Irishman. Indeed, Eddie thinks himself blessed with good luck. Going to Montecito to care for Mr. McCormick will, he is convinced, enable him to take center stage in the drama of his own life.
Over the next 20 years, Stanley will go from catatonia to a semblance of normality (so long as there's no woman in sight and no sharp cutlery on the table). Eddie, however, will never play the leading role he'd envisioned, instead taking refuge in alcohol and recollections of the one woman he thinks he has let get away, the plainspoken, explosive Giovannella Dimucci. When Eddie first describes his patient's violent response to women, "he wondered if he'd gone too far, if he'd shocked her, but the mask dissolved and she leaned in close, her hand on his elbow. 'Sounds like the average man to me.'" As for Katherine McCormick, she will still visit every Christmas, hoping to at least see her husband if she can't see him get better.
Based on a true story, Riven Rock is unclassifiable, a discomforting and often hilarious mix of tragedy and comedy. (Only Orson Welles could do the book justice on film.) T. C. Boyle writes in a controlled frenzy of rich description and dialogue, pulling us up sharply each time we begin to wonder if his patient isn't a helpless victim. Eddie recalls one nurse before Stanley "got to her": "She was a shadow in a back corner of his mind, a cat you pick up to stroke and then put down again when it stops purring.... Now she was back in Rhode Island, with her mother, but the look of her that day, the way her eyes had melted away to nothing and the color had gone out of her so you could see every lash and hair on her head like brushstrokes in oil, came to him in infinite sadness."
Boyle has great empathy, but there is no avoiding his novel's comic energy. Stanley's first psychiatrist-jailer, Dr. Hamilton, is obsessed with primate sexuality and will go to Riven Rock only if Katherine funds a large living laboratory. He spends all of his time watching the imprisoned creatures copulate, a pathetic counterpoint to his patient's plight. The sight of the disheveled doctor following one animal encounter amuses even the suspicious Katherine. "To his credit, the doctor laughed too. And O'Kane, the bruiser, who'd gone absolutely pale at the tiny hominoids that couldn't have weighed a twentieth of what he did, joined in, albeit belatedly and with a laugh that trailed off into a whinny." Alas, all goes awry when Hamilton takes the joke too far and declares his chimps "the very devils--they're even worse than my patients." Riven Rock is a maximum-velocity study of love, primal energy, and what is sacrosanct in society: control. It is also about loyalty, absurdity, domesticity, and depravity, all of which, Boyle knows, coexist within the best of souls.
Book Description
In Riven Rock, his most fully realized and compassionate novel to date, T.C. Boyle transforms two characters straight out of history into rich mythic creations whose tortured love and epic story is intimate enough to break our hearts. These unforgettable characters invite the reader's care as never before in a Boyle novel. With the scope of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, Riven Rock uses real American subjects to come to terms with love and loss in the early years of our century. Boyle anchors his tale with the remarkable and courageous Katherine Dexter. Wed to Stanley McCormick - thirty-one-year-old son of the millionaire inventor of the Reaper, and a schizophrenic sexual maniac - Katherine struggles to cure him while he is locked up in his Santa Barbara mansion and forbidden the mere sight of a women - above all, his wife. Throughout her career as a scisntist ad suffragette, her faith never wavers: one day, one of the psychiatrists she finds for her husband will, she insists, return him to her, free of demons, a yearned-for lover. "Still America's most imaginative contemporary novelist" (Newsweek), Boyle weaves his hallmark virtuoso prose onto a recreation of America's age of innocence against a backdrop of wealth and privilege. And at the center of Riven Rock are its people, somehow bound together in thier deep sense of fidelity to each other.
Customer Reviews:
Unconditional dysfunctional love..........2007-09-03
Yes, I finished RIVEN ROCK and have been mulling it over.
I remember mulling over a line from LOVE STORY, "Love means never having to say you're sorry."
Now, I have been mulling over a life of loving someone who never seems to be able to love you back, at least not appropriately. Love from afar. Stanley and Katherine.
Can we count love that seems so nontraditional? Perhaps that is the greatest kind of love of all... selfless and unconditional, hoping but not expecting to ever get anything back...Katherine's love for Stanley.
The dysfunction, the heartbreak...The multi-millionaire McCormick Family. Reaping what they sow...mental illness.
Of course I was not disappointed in the darkly humorous aspects of this tale of WHOA! Quirky sex acts that either didn't happen or were all wrong...apes and obssessive compulsive habits and the early courtship before it all went bust...good stuff. Good read. Lots to ponder for a long time.
Thanks, TCB.
Sympathy for the Devil.......2007-07-05
We are drawn into a horrific mental illness.No details are spared; the brilliance of this book is that our sympathy is maintained in spite of this.
Boyle wit and linguistic gusto.......2006-08-14
I'm a Boyle fan. I'm so glad to have discovered him and to know that every six months or so I can pick up a book (a new one or one of his many earlier works) and enjoy his quirky characters, inventive storylines and his wonderful language. Riven Rock is another strong showing. It's not as purely entertaining as Drop City, or as inventive as A Friend of the Earth, but it's a solid novel that displays all of Boyle's wit and linguistic gusto.
He's so good that I've come to accept certain characteristics of his writing that others might call flaws. For example, I don't think he nails endings with real finality. His books just eventually get to a point where it's time to stop. Everything isn't necessarily wrapped up. Now, if you're looking for things tied up neatly you'll be disappointed. But if you know that's unlikely to happen you'll do just fine. A T.C. Boyle book is likely NOT to lead to Stanley's miraculous recovery. You may hope for it throughout, but any Boyle reader will know not to expect the obvious.
I also find that over various books some of his charactes start to be duplicated in variations. The Edward character from this one, for example, is much like other selfish - horney - fickle - pathetic (and yet charismatic) characters from Boyle stories and novels. It's a type he returns to again and again. Personally, I like that. I'll take a little break, and then pick up another T.C. novel soon.
Loved it with qualifications.......2005-06-23
TC Boyle is such a good writer and story-teller, and this particular story and its attendant characters are so fascinating, that I found I couldn't put the book down. The prose is, for the most part, energetic, riveting, lush, evocative -- everything I've come to expect from Boyle. But I do agree with reviewer A. Maxham that Boyle hasn't dug quite deep enough into the character of Katherine to make us understand how such an obviously intelligent woman could have married the lunatic Stanley. I think he comes close -- love is a strange thing, and people fall in love despite obvious red flags all the time -- but in this case I had trouble believing that, when all was said and done, Katherine would go ahead and marry Stanley anyway. So it took a little more concerted effort to suspend my disbelief concerning that aspect of the book (and it's a central aspect). Still, I was willing to make the effort bec. I was enjoying the book so much, and I was sorry when the story ended.
absolutely worth a read........2005-05-16
My favorite part is the theme of being thwarted. Incrementally, and not perpetually, and frequently from within -- within yourself, your marriage, your family. Hope and frustration grappling back and forth, neither giving way for long.
It was a fascinating read and I devoured the book. I liked the descriptions, I liked the intermeshed characters, and I really, really liked the narrative structure that passes back and forth between past and present very skillfully. That said, while reading it was deeply satisfying, thinking back, there's something I just can't put my thumb on, something inside the book that feels... well, thwarted.
Average customer rating:
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Schizophrenic Speech: Making Sense of Bathroots and Ponds that Fall in Doorways
Peter J. McKenna , and
Tomasina M. Oh
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
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ASIN: 0521810752 |
Book Description
This book reviews our knowledge of the incoherent speech which can present as a symptom of schizophrenia. This is one of the most researched symptoms in the disorder. The content covers clinical presentation, differential diagnosis and the theories proposed to account for the symptom in these ‘thought disordered’ patients, ranging from the psychoanalytic to there being a form of aphasia involved. The book is unique in its ability to apply linguistic and neuropsychological approaches to the understanding of this condition, and is the first book to cover comprehensively the range of clinical studies that followed the introduction of Andreasen’s rating scale for what was then called thought, language and communication disorder. This book is essential reading for all those working in the field of schizophrenia and also for those interested in language and disorders of speech.
Book Description
Set against the backdrop of two neighboring Southern towns, Sufficient Grace is the powerful, affecting story of two families over the course of a year, from one Easter season to the next.
One quiet spring day, Gracie Hollaman hears voices in her head that tell her to get in her car and leave her entire life behind -- her home, her husband, her daughter, her very identity. Gracie's subsequent journey releases her genius for painting and effects profound changes in the lives of everyone around her.
A spellbinding work, Sufficient Grace explores the power of personal transformation and redemption, and the many ordinary and extraordinary ways they come to pass through faith, love, motherhood, art, even food. This poignant, poetic study of the human condition affirms the enduring importance of relationships and the strength we derive from them, even though we sometimes have to leave behind an old identity in order to discover our soul.
Beautifully paced, filled with unforgettable characters, Sufficient Grace reveals the vital place that spirit and belonging have in every inner life -- and in the everyday world.
Customer Reviews:
trite, cliche, and a lot of religion.......2007-10-01
This book is so... blah. It's trite- amazing how everything seems to work out; it's cliche... wise ol' black lady always giving such great advice, helpless husband learns to cook, woman finds absent mother, little book-worm boy learns to play, everyone finds love, everyones just comes to accept everything- mental illness, relationship w/o marriage, single motherhood... whatever else may come their way. And god, the preaching and religion lessons... I can't say enough negative things about this book b/c it doesn't deserve the time.
Unforgettable.......2007-06-27
This book is unforgettable, the characters, the landscape within. I wanted to know them. I could not put the book down. but had to anyway to take care of my family. I thought about the characters between reading sessions. This is a book you read over and over unpeeling the layers. The imagery of the Jesus paintings is with me still, though I read the book nearly a year ago.
Darmell Arnoult is an astounding talent.
A real star is rising..........2007-03-09
When you read this book, you try to think of another writer for comparison...and when you get that list going, it contains just a few names, those authors whose work stuck in your head - and your heart. Then you might wonder if Darnell isn't better at it than the rest you've read - and this is her first novel!
The flow of language and plot is so natural, but masterful; the connection with the spiritual world can't be taught in a writing workshop. The kinship with the characters - Darnell's and the reader's - must have been pre-destined in some unearthly place because now I know these people as well as Darnell does!
It has been several weeks since I finished SUFFICIENT GRACE; I think about the story almost every day.
As Good as Secret LIfe of Bees!.......2006-10-28
"Fans of Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd will love this first novel by
Darnell Arnoult."
Great book!.......2006-10-19
This story is so richly told through characters so real I wonder what they are doing today - this minute - because surely they live on. After finishing this book I have been amazed by the number of times I am reminded that life's challenges can be met with sufficient grace.
Read this book not only for its exquisite language, moving story and memorable characters, but for the lessons that linger.
Average customer rating:
- Another English story that's a good read
- In the House of Murdoch
- Monsters, monsters, everywhere
- Excellent! (Audio book review)
- Nearly as good as the early Barbara Vine's
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The Minotaur: A Novel
Barbara Vine
Manufacturer: Shaye Areheart Books
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0307237605
Release Date: 2006-03-21 |
Book Description
As soon as Kerstin Kvist arrives at remote, ivy-covered Lydstep Old Hall in Essex, she feels like a character in a gothic novel. A young nurse fresh out of school, Kerstin has been hired for a position with the Cosway family, residents of the Hall for generations. She is soon introduced to her “charge,” John Cosway, a thirty-nine-year-old man whose strange behavior is vaguely explained by his mother and sisters as part of the madness that runs in the family.
Weeks go by at Lydstep with little to mark the passage of time beyond John’s daily walks and the amusingly provincial happenings that engross the Cosway women, and Kerstin occupies her many free hours at the Hall reading or making entries into her diary. Meanwhile, bitter wrangling among Julia Cosway and her four grown daughters becomes increasingly evident. But this is just the most obvious of the tensions that charge the old remote estate, with its sealed rooms full of mystery. Soon Kerstin will find herself in possession of knowledge she will wish she’d never attained, secrets that will propel the occupants of Lydstep Old Hall headlong into sexual obsession, betrayal, and, finally, murder.
Also available in a Random House Large Print edition and as an eBook
Download Description
Barbara Vine is the author of such acclaimed novels as A Dark-Adapted Eye, Anna’s Book, Grasshopper, and The Blood Doctor. She has won many awards for literary accomplishment, including three Edgar Awards and four Gold Daggers.
From the Hardcover edition.
Customer Reviews:
Another English story that's a good read.......2007-05-10
Having completed degrees in both English and Nursing at the University of Lund in Sweden, the narrator of Barbara Vine's The Minotaur is twenty-four-year-old Kerstin Kvist. Kvist follows her English boyfriend Mark to England to continue their relationship. Through Mark's sister-in-law, she secures a position as private nurse to mentally disturbed John Cosway, and thus begins a novel that is at once classic gothic and unconventional murder mystery.
The wind in the leaves of the Virginia creeper vine covering Lydstep Old Hall when Kerstin's first sees it, gives the illusion of movement, of a constantly shifting perspective. So too is Kerstin's view of the Cosway family constantly shifting, as like Theseus of myth, and she wanders inevitably closer to the monster at the heart of this maze of a story.
From the first, Kerstin is unconvinced that schizophrenia is what afflicts John, and the daily doses of both Phenobarbital and a highly powerful anti-psychotic, make her deeply uncomfortable. Though Julia Cosway, the family matriarch, insists it was John who requested a nurse, Kerstin finds it hard to believe John is capable of doing so while under the influence of these drugs. But why would Mrs. Cosway drug her own son? And what traumatic event did he witness that caused his supposed illness?
In addition to Mrs. Cosway, Lydgate Old Hall is also home to John's four sisters, Ida, the drudge; Winifred, the vicar's fiance; Ella, the schoolteacher; and Zorah, the jetsetter--who complete the portrait of this supremely dysfunctional family, all members of which trade in secrets, lies, and emotional blackmail.
Vine plays on many stereotypes of the English gothic country house novel and even Kerstin compares Lydstep Old Hall to Manderley and Thornfield. But this is no gothic romance and the unavoidable climax of The Minotaur is more disturbing than Rebecca or Jane Eyre ever were.
FYI: Barbara Vine is a pen name for Ruth Rendell, the bestselling crime novelist. She has written many novels, including The Lake of Darkness, The Killing Doll, The Tree of Hands, Live Flesh, Heartstones and The Veiled One.
Armchair Interviews says: A book that will appeal to readers on many levels.
In the House of Murdoch.......2007-03-30
Ruth Rendell's latest novel under her other name, Barbara Vine, is one of her best efforts to date. As with all the books under the Vine name, the question here is not so much whodunnit as how did something awful come to happen: in this case, we know that the heroine, Kerstin Kvist, went to an Essex manor house called Lydstep Old Hall in the Sixties to help care for a disturbed adult man who libes with his arrogant old mother and four slightly unhinger sisters, and that something awful happened while she was there. We spend the rest of the novel waiting to find out what exactly happened.
This is Vine's most Gothic novel in quite some time, and though the gigantic Virginia creeper-entwined Lydstep Old Hall reminds the heroine of Brontë and Du Maurier, the novelist whose work this novel seems really closest to is Iris Murdoch. The Cosways, with their unusual first names, short tempers, love of sex and high-handed behavior, seem to recall the Britons from Murdoch's novels, and the novel's fine sense of place will call to mind some of Murdoch's most striking books from the early 60s like THE TIME OF THE ANGELS and THE UNICORN. The characterization is quite strong, although the character of Ida Cosway never comes as fully to life as those of her sisters, and the intelligent narrator's inertia when faced with the Cosways' rude behavior to her is often hard to believe (although Vine keeps trying to explain it to us). The other characters, however, are quite intriguing, particularly the Minotaur himself, John Cosway.
Monsters, monsters, everywhere.......2007-03-01
In Greek legend, the minotaur is a bull-like monster who dwells in the midst of a vast labyrinth. In Ms. Rendell's novel, the title appears to be referring to John Cosway, an autistic man who lives with his mother and four sisters in a run-down, ramshackle estate. As the story develops, however, it seems that this is an entire family of monsters, with the son being,in actuality, the most human of them all. The mother and four sisters are almost completely selfish and self-motivated, often at the expense of their children or siblings, although one sister is perhaps a little better than the rest. This is not my favorite work by Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine but I think it is one of the most memorable. Whether writing as Ms. Rendell or Ms. Vine, Ms. Rendell is such an expert at developing character, motivations, and interesting situations, that her books under either name are highly enjoyable and a true pleasure to read.
Excellent! (Audio book review).......2006-11-09
This book is a Victorian English Gothic Crime novel set in modern times. Truly a delicious book that is typical of Rendell/Vine. If you liked the Blood Doctor (Barbara Vine), you should enjoy this novel, too. By the way, I listened to the anabridged audio book that doesn't seem to be available thru Amazon, for some reason.
Nearly as good as the early Barbara Vine's.......2006-07-12
Though not my favorite of Rendell's books written as Barbara Vine (her best are the first three she published as Vine - "A Dark Adapted Eye", "Fatal Inversion" and "House of Stairs") this was still an excellent psychological thriller and much better than her last "The Blood Doctor". I really felt her depiction of John's autism "rang true" and found it interesting that all of the true Cosway sisters had quicks that could be considered "soft" signs of autism or Aspberger's Syndrome. Like most Rendell/Vine stories the characters are far more interesting than the ultimate crime.
Average customer rating:
- title is a misnomer
- A veritable encyclopedia of psychiatry and mental health
- "Conquering Schizophrenia" is thoroughly dishonest book.
- Extremely helpful and hopeful. Well written and thorough.
|
Conquering Schizophrenia: A Father, His Son, and a Medical Breakthrough
Peter Wyden
Manufacturer: Knopf
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ASIN: 0679446710
Release Date: 1998-01-27 |
Amazon.com
Described by Nature magazine in 1988 as "arguably the worst disease affecting mankind, even AIDS not excepted," schizophrenia is devastating for both sufferers of the affliction--more than 50 million people worldwide--and their families. Conquering Schizophrenia is one family's account of their terrible, 25-year journey to hell and back.
Jeff Wyden was a bubbly and vivacious child, described by his father as "unusually charming." In early adolescence, small changes occurred in Jeff's personality--his boundless energy was replaced with silence and a devastatingly low self-esteem. By age 21, Jeff had become severely psychotic and completely withdrawn from reality. So began the nightmare of schizophrenia. Jeff's story is eloquently told by his father, Peter Wyden. Although an inspirational book, especially for those affected by a mental illness, the Conquering Schizophrenia doesn't lapse into excessive sentimentality. Jeff is frequently portrayed as a monster, consumed by the wretched disease. Treatment options for the illness were particularly grim, including prefrontal lobotomies and electric-shock therapy. For more than two decades, Peter Wyden searched for a better answer, which eventually came with the development of new drugs. With this treatment, Jeff was "almost civilian" again. Wyden is an energetic and illuminating author who writes of a subject matter with which he has lived so closely for several decades.
Book Description
This story of a father guiding his son from despair to hope is a chilling, inspiring journey through the mysterious tunnel of schizophrenia--a world once closed and forbidding, now suddenly radiating excitement as thousands of patients are, in effect, being reborn.
Jeff Wyden, a bright, happy boy in childhood, began to withdraw in adolescence, and by the age of twenty-one was severely psychotic, disconnected from reality. He was schizophrenic. In the ensuing twenty-five years, Peter Wyden accompanied his son into a hell without certainties as they searched for a solution.
We see them pass through the hands of more than fifty psychiatrists and countless hospitals, clinics, and halfway houses. Doctors and health-care providers help and sometimes hinder both father and son in their odyssey through hypnosis, electroshock, dozens of drug therapies, and disabling "side effects."
Throughout their ordeal, the father's management of his son's managers is his daily task, self-assigned despite self-doubt. He is alternately tolerant and challenging while he observes and learns, always primed for more of Jeff's mercurial signs of new crises.
Along the way we learn about the history of the treatment of schizophrenia, from barbaric stopgaps like prefrontal lobotomy to the biomedical treatments that have revolutionized psychiatry. And finally, there is the new drug Olanzapine--a godsend for Jeff, and reason for cheer. It is not a cure, but many consider it the safest, most effective treatment to date (the first of similar medications recently licensed by the Food and Drug Administration, with more on the way). The story of its development is told here for the first time.
Until now, few of us have realized that two and a half million Americans, mostly young and intelligent, are schizophrenic, merely existing through the decades, separated from reason, rendered dysfunctional by the costly and little-understood disease. Fifty million people worldwide suffer from it. This compelling and enlightening book offers useful information about what can be done for them today--and the hope of more help to come.
Customer Reviews:
title is a misnomer.......1999-09-04
author spends a great deal of time (xxx? pages) oscillating between blaming mental health professionals and presenting himself as a devoted father (perhaps too devoted?--i.e. overly responsible?)...furthermore schizophrenia is not "conquered" at the end of the book...rather only the right drug is found--which eliminates symptoms but which, contrary to popular belief, does not "cure" mental illness (since the patient is only well as long as he is medicated)
A veritable encyclopedia of psychiatry and mental health.......1999-07-13
Before you ransack the library trying to get straight about mental illness, just read Peter Wyden's "Conquering Schizophrenia - a Father, his Son, and a Medical Breakthrough." Wyden, a writer, tells of his son Jeff's 25-years of crippling psychosis, and his story vibrates with passionate critique of the mental health system. His journalist's piercing eye fixes the target, while the other eye darts around, taking us on a back-street tour of psychiatry's history, players, and struggles as Wyden searches for perspective on this arena.
What is the target? Is it Jeff himself, who went from warm,extroverted child to introverted, erratic youth, then back to a more normal, properly medicated 46-year old man? Is it mental illness itself? Which illness? Jeff's was diagnosed as "school phobia," "anxiety," "depression," "schizophrenia - paranoid type," then "malignant case of manic-depressive." Perhaps it is psychiatry itself, with its "foibles,follies, and failures," and its oddly noble persistance in the face of overwhelming enigmas?
In any case, the target keeps moving. This conveys Wyden's sense of confusion and hair-pulling frustration through the dozens of psychiatrists, neuroleptics that ravaged the body while they calmed the mind, the hospitals, and halfway houses that make up Jeff's existence. He shows us the "split" between modern medicaters who treat the physical, and the traditional Freudians who believe only in the unconscious and psychoanalytic. He describes the bizarre events of pharmacology finds and the equally bizarre trip through FDA approval. He narrates the bitter 20-year feud between Dr Spitzer and proponents of DSM series and the older therapists who call it a "straightjacket."
The sound and fury, based on the void of the unknown, rages on. There is an abyss between etiologies, and chaos about categories. Signs of schizophrenia dovetail so slyly into signs of manic-depression (hallucinations, hyperagitation) that even "experts" can't say which is primary. Medications for one cross over for the other. "My learning curve was turning erratic," complained Wyden when Clozaril came on the scene. ". . . Anything might work. Anything might fail. . . There are no true experts."
At the book's end, Jeff is converting from Clozapin to the newer Olanzapine (the "breakthrough"), and seems to be emerging from his demi-world into a more responsive, organized person. His real diagnosis is still up for grabs.
The real breakthrough is hope, for today and for tomorrow, hope that research and medicine can cut through the profound devastation of a broken brain. Wyden has painted a realistic picture of major mental illness - ambiguous, unpredictable, messy, and bankrupting. Only those who have traveled that tunnel of despair can appreciate the candle of this seemingly promising advance.
"Conquering Schizophrenia" is thoroughly dishonest book........1998-10-25
"Conquering Schizophrenia" lauds Zyprexa as conquering schizophrenia. The truth of the matter is that Zyprexa is a very, very unpleasant medication. Zyprexa is better than other antipsychotics, but that is faint praise. Jeff, the author's son, is left with negative symptoms but those are the worst symptoms. The book takes the E. Fuller Torrey line. Someone with schizophrenia is dumber than a pigeon. A pigeon given something good presses the lever. Someone with schizophrenia given something good refuses medication. When everyone is off dopamine antagonists then a book with the title "Conquering Schizophrenia" can be written.
Extremely helpful and hopeful. Well written and thorough........1998-02-07
"Conquering Schizophrenia: A Father, His Son, and A Medical Breakthrough", published by Knopf, January 1998, is a father's account of the life of his son Jeff. Jeff's break came at age twenty-one. The book chronicles the next twenty-five years along two interwoven paths: the events in the lives of Jeff and his family and the evolution of the mental-health field during this time --its trends, controversies, therapies, medicines, practitioners, advocacy groups, agencies, economics, politics, etc.
The father/author, Peter Wyden, has published a dozen books and was formerly a writer for Newsweek. He writes in a concise, organized, journalistic style that is mercifully free of any self aggrandizement that might have been expected (he candidly acknowledges his missteps) and of any excessive sentimentality (the story itself speaks eloquently of the emotions, frustrations, struggles and celebrations that were there throughout). He levels some very valid criticisms without being strident. It is carefully crafted with detailed back-of-the-book chapter notes, bibliography and index for the reader who wants to dig deeper. It is very up to date, mentioning situations as of Fall, 1997. (Of course we Internet devotees want to know how things are going this morning.)
I strongly recommend this book highly to anyone whose life has been affected by schizophrenia or by any other serious mental illness. I have been struck over the last four years (our 23-year old son was diagnosed with schizophrenia four years ago) how much I read about one mental illness that relates to the others. (Incidentally, I have no connection to the publisher or author. I wish I did know the Wydens personally).
Jeff was treated by over 50 docs over the 25-year period. He was "treated" in every imaginable theater from the renowned Menninger Clinic, where at the time of Jeff's stay early on, probably did more harm than good, to a run-down half- way house, where he was helped greatly by a dedicated, compassionate social worker.
His symptoms when bad were very bad. He once broke a nurse's nose. He was not an easy patient and not an easy son. But those that got to know the real Jeff were very fond of him. And to his father, even after spending 25 years of struggling with Jeff over meds, docs, hygiene, etc., maybe to some extent because of those struggles, Jeff was a hero, a theme often repeated.
Family support helped (and I suspect help greatly) throughout. There were some talk/cognitive therapies here and there that helped deal with some of the problems of the underlying illness. Jeff's manic periods were helped by lithium. There were other meds that I cannot recount. A breakthrough came with Clozapine, though negative symptoms, especially lack of motivation, remained and a purposeful day, much less the possibility of a job, were not on Jeff's radar screen and he spent his hours at the half-way house. The "conquering" word in the title refers to the next breakthrough which came with Olanzapine in 1996. Some of the negative symptoms begin to remit. The book ends with Jeff beginning to take some steps into the mainstream world and he gets involved with a local church program and one day asks his dad "Do you think you could get me a watch? I'd like to get my days organized". (!) You would have to read the whole story to understand what a wonderful ending (beginning) this is.
Perhaps I wouldn't have divulged the ending if the book only dealt with Jeff's situation. It would have been a great book if limited to just the Jeff story. Many of us could identify and empathize and imagine our own books. Not to take away from the story, the real strength of this book for me was the second interwoven thread that dealt with the many aspects of the mental-health system as it evolved over the same twenty-five-year period and the interplay of that with Jeff's life. The author was relentless in his researching, advocating and mainly getting to know individuals who could help his son. He knew or got to know many of the movers and shakers, those at the tops of their fields, and gleaned from them a detailed and realistic survey of the battlefield on which his son found himself. I have spent a lot of time myself the last few years reading, surfing the Web, meeting, etc., but was left with a lot of questions and perhaps was left without a a good overall perspective of how the many pieces interact.
The author does a masterful job of covering many areas and gleaning the salient features, good and bad, things you are never going to read in a journal or hear admitted for the record. For example, from a discussion with Dr. Solomon Snyder, the inventor of Prozac: "One question has run through Snyder's professional life: What exactly causes schizophrenia? ... 'We know so little he said', he said sadly. 'There's a screw loose, but we don't know which screw.'" I think I would like to have known this four years ago rather than having to discover it over time. The book is filled with nuggets like this.
The wide-ranging areas covered include: the slow, grudging acceptance of using meds for treatment, later the doctrinaire rejections by the biological guys of the talk therapy guys, (thank goodness my son's doc is dual-track), the fights over wording of the DSM-III, the history of anti-psychotic meds (amazing twists and turns), meds in the pipeline, the R. D. Laing school, orthomolecular treatment, psychosocial treatment, electro-convulsive therapy, schizophrenogenic mothers,"Toxic Psychology" book, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" movie, Marilyn Monroe, atrocious experiments and abridgment of patient rights, sexual abuse, the history of the National Alliance of the Mentally Ill, the champions of mental health legislation in Washington, the big, profitable, competitive pharmacy business (Eli Lily sales of Olanzapine in 1997 about $850 million), the National Institute of Mental Health, various studies and meta studies (and the ongoing puzzlement), interviews with consumers, interviews with the big names, etc.
He writes of many problems/challenges: the general stumbling nature of the progress in this field, the unknown causes of the illness, the problems of diagnosis and the diagnostic categories, questions about treatment, side- effect tradeoffs, stigma, managing the managers, family stresses, under funding of research and support agencies and the crushing work loads, poverty- producing expenses, bureaucracy, on and on.
I found the book very satisfying in many ways. It most of all helps sustain our hope. And makes us appreciate the fact that despite all the difficulties we families are facing in 1998, times and prospects were much worse just a few years age. It chronicles a story we can relate to and can compare to our families' stories. It always held up the humanity, the personality of Jeff.
It shines a light on the battlefield that still has its challenges and dangers but through which we can now walk with more confidence and with a better chance of survival or even conquest.
I wish the best to the Wydens and to all the many families doing battle.
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