For over a decade I have been the loving partner and carer of a woman diagnosed with 'schizo-affective disorder.' “Is Alice?” incorporates a description of some of her experiences during her last hospitalisation over six years ago within a fictional setting, as Theo struggles to understand Alice’s madness and develop his organic theory of consciousness that might help explain such a devastating illness and the canvas of 'normality' from which madness can bloom.

I am convinced 'schizophrenia' is not a medical problem. It is an existential one. It isn’t a ‘disease.’ It is a catastrophic disordering of the values of the world – a fiction, really, but one that is as 'real' as the common sense world we mistakenly think we know so well. Because it, too, is a fiction we have agreed upon, lies and all. I have called it the social matrix.

My view of the psychiatric treatment of blameless victims of madness is that it struggles blindly to brutally shoehorn a distressing human problem into a medical model that is as primitive as phrenology. In an affront to Hippocrates, psychiatrists can harm their patients. At the very least, simple asylum would do no more harm to human beings who, though mad, still deserve our unremitting respect. Instead there are drugs, electro-convulsive 'therapy', and even psycho-surgery – the effects of which are poorly understood by the psychiatric community. Sufferers are incarcerated in prison-like buildings, and far too often suffer abuse and neglect by indifferent, badly-trained staff.

Published by Chipmunka. Available at Amazon or bookshops.

 out of  found this valuable. Do you find this valuable?