Verwandte Artikel zu The Ghost Garden: Inside the lives of schizophrenia's...

The Ghost Garden: Inside the lives of schizophrenia's feared and forgotten - Hardcover

Doherty, Susan

 
9780735276505: The Ghost Garden: Inside the lives of schizophrenia's feared and forgotten
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0735276501 ISBN 13: 9780735276505
Verlag: Random House Canada, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

A rare work of narrative non-fiction that illuminates a world most of us try not to see: the daily lives of the severely mentally ill, who are medicated, marginalized, locked away and shunned.

Susan Doherty's groundbreaking book brings us a population of lost souls, ill-served by society, feared, shunted from locked wards to rooming houses to the streets to jail and back again. For the past ten years, some of the people who cycle in and out of the severely ill wards of the Douglas Institute in Montreal, have found a friend in Susan, who volunteers on the ward, and then follows her friends out into the world as they struggle to get through their days.

With their full cooperation, she brings us their stories, which challenge the ways we think about people with mental illness on every page. The spine of the book is the life of Caroline Evans (not her real name), a woman in her early sixties whom Susan has known since she was a bright and sunny school girl. Caroline had formed a close friendship with Susan and shared stories from her life; through her, we experience what living with schizophrenia over time is really like. She has been through it all, including the way the justice system treats the severely mentally ill: at one point, she believed that she could save her roommate from the devil by pouring boiling water into her ear...
    
Susan interleaves Caroline's story with vignettes about her other friends, human stories that reveal their hopes, their circumstances, their personalities, their humanity. She's found that if she can hang in through the first ten to fifteen minutes of every coffee date with someone in the grip of psychosis, then true communication results. Their "madness" is not otherworldly: instead it tells us something about how they're surviving their lives and what they've been through. The Ghost Garden is not only touching, but carries a cargo of compassion and empathy.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

SUSAN DOHERTY is a Montreal writer whose award-winning debut novel, A Secret Music, was published in 2015. She worked on staff for Maclean's, and freelanced for The International Herald Tribune, La Tribune de Genève, and The Independent in London, and for eighteen years ran her own advertising production company. She has served on the boards of the Royal Conservatory of Music, the Quebec Writers' Federation and Nazareth House, a home for those afflicted by addiction and homelessness. Since 2009, she has volunteered at the Douglas Institute, a psychiatric hospital, working with people living with severe mental illness. She is married to the educator Hal Hannaford, and has two children.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

INTRODUCTION

An Invitation to the Ghost Garden

I did not intend to write a book about people who live with schizophrenia. But in October 2009, a door opened in front of me and I unexpectedly found myself face to face with a group of highly misunderstood souls. The door was to an elevator that required a special key to gain access. It carried me up to a locked ward. I’d never gone anywhere in the hospital where the doors shut tight behind me. My legs were a little shaky and my heart was thumping as I stepped off the elevator into a hallway where listless men and women in various states of undress regarded me with suspicious eyes. Grooming was non-existent. Their slippers whispered to the linoleum as they shuffled along, many in flapping hospital gowns, murmuring to themselves.

I was there as a new volunteer to meet a woman I’ll call Camilla. Her doctor had described her background to me only as “troubled.” I wore a zebra-print cotton dress, and as it turned out, on that day Camilla was wearing a zebra-print cotton top. She gave me the once-over as she came towards me, a penetrating gaze that seemed to burn a hole right through to my core. But we became friends that afternoon and we remained friends until the hour of her death—a relationshipthat altered us both.

Months before that first trip to a locked ward for the extremelymentally ill, I had come to this hospital—the Douglas Institute—todo research for a novel set in 1930s Montreal that touched on the era’sheartbreaking psychiatric practices. I spent many hours in the libraryand archive department, where I watched a vintage black-and-whitemovie of a patient undergoing shock therapy. I saw photos of a terrifiedwoman with strips of cloth jammed into her ears to block unwantedvoices. I read the case histories of people who’d been dropped off at thehospital by their families and never reclaimed. The hospital was socandid and transparent about historical treatment options that after Iwas done with my research I wanted to reciprocate their generosity insome way. So I offered my time as a volunteer. If I’m honest, what I’dseen in the archive and on the hospital grounds also weighed on myconscience. It was clear that people were still being cast off, shuntedaside, even shunned, and I wanted to help.

John Matheson, a priest who headed the volunteer department,interviewed me for more than three hours. He asked me a hundredquestions, none of which seemed to have any relevance to mental illness.We talked about whales, of all things. Then I had to pass a policecheck. After all that, I assumed I would be tasked with filing documentsor some such clerical chore, maybe working at the foundationor a reception desk. Instead, Matheson asked me to befriend Camilla.I said okay, though I admit I was not only frightened but also unsurewhether I was up to the job. She lived on a ward for the chronicallymentally ill.

But, somehow, Camilla and I came together as two people. Shetaught me that having even a single friend is not a given when yourmind has been claimed by a psychotic disorder. She taught me about shame, addiction, sexual abuse, homelessness, and the true meaning of condescension. She didn’t use words to articulate those themes; rather, I saw her plight with my own eyes. People with schizophrenia often live far outside the boundary of acceptance.

I was not given a laundry list of what was wrong with Camilla, nor a description of a past that would define her today or limit her tomorrows. The days and weeks and years after I met her honed my understanding of schizophrenia, and led me to advocate on behalf of those who were unable to do so for themselves. That first friendship led to another and another, and soon I was transfixed by the lives of the marginalized and forsaken. My ability—if you can call it that—to connect with people who have been pushed to society’s margins made me long to gather and communicate their stories.

And then, in the middle of all these extraordinary encounters, a dear friend from elementary school asked me if I would write the life story of her sister, a woman who has struggled with severe mental illness for decades. Caroline Evans (not her real name) is now in her sixties, and has cycled in and out of hospitals and group homes looking to be cured for thirty years. She has never been able to elude schizophrenia. It’s an edgeless, unknowable, looping odyssey, which no one drug or treatment regimen will fix. To the burden of the person already suffering from voices in their head and other horrors, add stigma, isolation, and marginalization. The easy path was to view Caroline as an incurable, obese, crazy lady, but I couldn’t stop thinking that at one time she had been just like me. In all the most important ways, she still is. Her experiences have become the spine of this book.

I first met Caroline in 1967 when she was in grade four, over fifty years ago. She was a bubbly, white-blond nine-year-old with an infectious laugh, who showed no hint of what was in store. At the age of twenty-one, something changed within her brain and she began to experience violent sexual hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia. Caroline herselfalso wanted me to tell her story in order to tease out, if I could, thereasons why she has had grave difficulty maintaining recovery and topresent a set of circumstances that might be familiar to and havemeaning for others. The mistakes that were made in Caroline’s life andtreatment are lessons for family members who find themselves drawn,unwitting and unwilling, into the chaos of mental illness. 

Since 2011, I have had hundreds of phone conversations with Caroline as she has crawled back into the darkest corners of her memory,places she thought were either inaccessible or best left undisturbed.I probed. She answered. We have laughed and we have cried over thetelling of her life, but it’s her honesty that has driven the writing. Andthe text, as a result, is scattered with her thoughts: frank reflections ona tattered life and the hard lessons she has learned.

Intermingled with Caroline’s story are eighteen vignettes of the menand women who have also spoken to me of their deepest desires, unmetlongings, and unimaginable hurts. For some, I am their only friend.The loneliness I have witnessed is beyond the beyond. What began forme as a weekly volunteer commitment has transformed into a need toshed light on the truth of debilitating mental illness. To prove thathope exists. Without this first-hand experience, I would not have beenable to understand the hurdles of a misunderstood condition that stilldeeply frightens us as a society, even as we seem to grow more comfortabletalking about depression and anxiety. Without my friendships, I would not have been able to do justice to Caroline’s story or articulatethe tangled nuances of psychosis that plague the people I write about.

I’ve changed all the names and some identifying details, but the storiesin this book have been sanctioned by those who have suffered, be itpatient or family member. (I have not changed the names of the doctorsand health professionals I quote for their insights into both Caroline’s long history, and the treatment of schizophrenia in general.) I didn’t set out to do this, but I have inadvertently created a forum that allowed the psychologically afflicted, medicated or self-medicated, the walking wounded, to voice their truths. Those who are ignored and stepped around on the streets, the homeless who cycle in and out of wards and through rooming houses, are hardly seen as human, and are left to wander in a ghost garden—an interior haven where emotional pain can be suppressed.

Along with Caroline and my other friends, the heroes of this book are...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Random House Canada
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0735276501
ISBN 13 
9780735276505
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
360
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Yeepin GmbH
492000000000
sunshine12232@outlook.com

Alleestr.11
Kaiserslautern
Rheinland-Pfalz
67655
Deutschland