Agnes's Jacket: A Psychologist's Search for the Meanings of Madness.Revised and Updated with a New Epilogue by the Author

ISBN-13: 9781138297418 / Angielski / Miękka / 2017 / 326 str.

Gail Hornstein

Opis

In a Victorian-era German asylum, seamstress Agnes Richter painstakingly stitched a mysterious autobiographical text into every inch of the jacket she created from her institutional uniform. Despite every attempt to silence them, hundreds of other psychiatric patients have managed to get their stories out, or to publish them on their own. Today, in a vibrant network of peer-advocacy groups all over the world, those with first-hand experience of emotional distress are working together to unravel the mysteries of madness and to help one another recover. Agnes's Jacket tells their story, focusing especially on the Hearing Voices Network (HVN), an international collaboration of professionals, people with lived experience, and their families and friends who have been working to develop an alternative approach to coping with voices, visions, and other extreme states that is empowering and useful and does not start from the assumption that such people have a chronic illness. A vast gulf exists between the way medicine explains psychiatric conditions and the experiences of those who suffer. Hornstein's work helps us to bridge that gulf, guiding us through the inner lives of those diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar illness, depression and paranoia, and emerging with nothing less than a new model for understanding one another and ourselves.

Spis treści

Introduction 1. The Voice Hearer 2. Beyond Belief 3. The Network 4. Mavericks in Maastricht 5. Who's Crazy Now? 6. Freedom Center 7. Prisoner Abuse 8. He Might Be Houdini 9. Field Notes 10. Peter, Who Comes from Jesus 11. Philosophy of a Lunatic 12. Whitsbury House 13. Experts by Experience 14. Secrets and Hostages 15. Train Tracks 16. Free Speech 17. Trauma and Testimony 18. Displaced Persons 19. The Mental Market 20. Hunger Strikers 21. The Late Quartets 22. Hidden in Plain Sight 23. Visions Wrapped in Riddles 24. Written on the Body 25. The Wound Does the Healing 26. Finding What Works and What Doesn't Epilogue Notes and Resources