mad books

I've been reminiscing - again - this time about the books which have shaped my ideas about madness and mad people.

I don't mean the serious books I purposely read to learn about it e.g. A sociology of mental health and illness by Anne Rogers and David Pilgrim or Users and Abusers of Psychiatry; A Critical Look at Psychiatric Practice by Lucy Johnstone or Mental Health Matters: A Reader edited by Tom Heller.

Or the many self-help books I've poured over in search of answers. (I particularly like Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway by Susan Jeffers - the title alone is brilliant. I wouldn't be doing this blog or involved with Oor Mad History or CAPS or anything if I didn't recite that mantra a lot.)

I mean the books I primarily read for pleasure, before I was particularly interested in mental health issues, services, theories...

And the books I read when I did get interested, the fiction and autobiography.... the books that moved me, stirred me, comforted me, angered me.

I didn't read The Bell Jar until quite recently and I have never read (or watched) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I did try The Bell Jar years ago, but the protagonist annoyed me in the first chapter so I didn't persist.

It's hard to remember after about 20 years of reading, thinking, talking, rereading.

But I thought, if I put this out there, it might stir some distant memories.

Books, the arts and me

I wrote this on April 11th, 2009

When I was a child and a teenager in the 1970s and 1980s, I thirsted for news of a wider world. Not the adult world of politics and responsibility but a world of ideas and sex and love and adventure. I searched for it in the right-wing newspapers, in the occasional arty film on the new tv channel, in the music press and in the music itself and most of all in books. Books on the narrow school curriculum, shabby paperbacks from even shabbier second hand shops, worn plastic-wrapped hardbacks in the local library. High literature from the past, texts of plays by Russians and Norwegians, or second-rate fiction with near-naked women on the cover. It didn't really matter. 

I found bits and pieces, hints and promises that life did not have to be like the dull future which seemed my destiny. I wanted something more than and different to that. Not that I could imagine anyone employing me or marrying me but these seemed the only future - a job and a husband. I was told often enough of my faults and my lack of ability.
But I was a good enough student at school, not obedient but interested. Physics experiments, French essays, the history of the Irish language, the Romantics, Bismarck, calculus - they all absorbed me in different ways and to different degrees. (It is satisfying now to think of how many of those interests, in different forms, still interest me.) 

But now I have the internet! Since my early thirties, I have been messing about online, finding more and more to read and watch and listen, almost drowning in words and images. I still feel the compulsion to seek out all the new things I can find... It chokes me sometimes. There is so much that I skip from site to site. No time or inclination for the close reading of a story which made my legs weak or the close listening to a song which made me gasp on the rare occasions I heard it on the radio. I am still the same child as I was in the 80s with the same thirst. But I am older and slower and there is so much to connect to still. I will never reach all that I yearn for. That saddens me and excites me.

Over two years on, most of this is still true. I am a bit more focused when I make myself focus, but I am still easily distracted by the internet and overwhelmed by all it opens up to me. But I am a bit more relaxed about it.

15 books in 15 minutes

A couple of years ago (8 May 2009)  I did this meme:  list 15 books that will always stick with you and do it within a 15 minute time frame.

• Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
• Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
• The Luck of Brin Five by Cherry Wilder
• That Place by Andrea Loewenstein Freud
• Four Days in the Life of Lisa by Christine Nostlinger
• My Friends books by Jane Duncan
• Starbridge novels by Susan Howatch
• Alice Miller
• Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
• Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keys
• Dubliners by James Joyce
• The autobiography of Malcolm X
• Man's Search for Meaning
• My Gender Workbook by Kate Bornstein
• The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

Cheated a bit there - two series and one author - I couldn't think of one book by Alice Miller that stood out above the rest to choose for this.

It's pretty mixed. Kids books, SF, autobiography, heavy, light, funny, sad, graphic novel, classics, short stories, novels...

I can understand why I chose each of them. And I think I might have come up with a slightly different 15 today but a lot of them would be in there, I think.