Penny Gray

Right from the start, the phrase the author uses here (she prefers “mental distress” to “mental illness”) reflects her wholly sympathetic view of its sufferers. Mental anguish and full-blown breakdowns are still pretty much a taboo subject, its victims shunned and even blamed for their own suffering. No other form of malady humans are prone to has anything like the degree of stigma that’s attached to this one—and in fact as Cheryl, one of the contributors here, says herself: “…everyone else’s fear is projected onto a person so they’re a kind of scapegoat.”
    The bulk of this book consists of eleven examples of “breakdowns”, but seen from the inside, described by the sufferers themselves. Penny Gray, whose own crisis and recovery inspired a life-long fascination with the subject, interviewed them and the resulting series of tape-recordings are (with some minimal editing) what is presented here. It’s a small sample of cases of course, but some common themes emerge even so, such as the often clumsy and ineffectual responses of the medical and psychiatric professions. And while much of the material is undramatic, every now and then you glimpse the horror too from some of the harrowing things extreme suffering can lead people to do: a twenty-year-old woman, for example, stepping out in front of a speeding car at night in a desperate bid to end hers.
    There are clearly two opposite ways of dealing with this torture: some people explode outwards—attacking medics, psychiatric care workers, the police, anybody; attacking themselves too through overdosing or self-harm—while others bottle the same suffering up so completely, people around them may not even realise there’s anything seriously wrong (“I’m very good. I’ve learned over the years to keep everything inside, so I’ll present one face to the public and I’ll be dying inside”). The quietest and most understated story here, from a guy called Adrian, captured better than any other the sheer bleakness of what this can be like—a life like a desert without water, or fulfilment, or joy.
    These hells, though, do all have one thing in common: the way their victims are routinely treated by others. The rule seems to be this: the more appalling the suffering, the more contempt and ridicule is to be heaped on them. So this book is a glimpse, yes, inside minds on the brink and sometimes beyond it, but it’s a glimpse of the rest of us too: “…we need to recognise that we all have mental distress at some level, and that the wise response to it is one of compassion.”… (más)