*** the review below was written some time ago. now that i have read the whole book i don't have a whole lot to add except the following. this book deserves to be read widely and carefully. it's a wonderful book and a delightful, riveting read. it's written as a story and it's packed with beauty, intelligence, wisdom. it is a clarion call for much-needed change. if we continue treating mental illness the way we are currently doing (especially in the US), we will create a larger and larger generation of unnecessarily diminished, crippled people. we need to rethink the way we approach madness. we need to get the pharmaceutical and the insurance companies WAY under control. we need to radically restructure the system of care. we need single payer, universal, government-sponsored health care. we need to find a way to address the systemic and systematic sadism of mental health care providers. we need to get the consumers into the conversation and grant them full agency, control, and personhood. we need to eliminate compulsive care. we need a movement the size of the women's movement, the gay rights movement, and the disability rights movement. nothing will change without a movement. ***


i read up to page 90. i read fast and furiously, and was very bummed when i couldn't carry on because the descriptions of psychosis were bothering me. this book is GREAT and i have no doubt i'll come back to it, finish it, reread it, teach it, spread it, gift it, learn from it. i am tempted to say it's the best popular book about hallucinations and psychosis i've read, and i am aware that it's a book written by a psychologist and not a "voice hearer." but gail hornstein has been solidly on the side of the patient for many years (she was the first to compile a list of patients' autobiographies and memoirs of "mental illness" in english and her list is still invaluable). as for her account, she was eight-balled for her refusal to follow the status quo in its infantilization, other-making, and pathologizing of people in psychic pain, and had to do some of her pro-patient work stealthily. the book is so respectful, profound, and full of integrity, i could not find an ounce of condescension or superiority in it, not even of the anthropological kind. hornstein goes to Hearing Voices Network meetings in the UK for years, and then does the same in the US with Freedom Center meetings. she doesn't hide her identity, asks permission of the group members to be at the meetings, and behaves exactly as the other people -- partaking in the tragedies big and small of voice hearers, sharing her experience, and chipping in when help (generally of the listening kind, sometimes of a more concrete sort) is needed. in other words, she becomes one of the guys and one has the impression she doesn't miss a meeting. since she's not a clinician, she doesn't "treat" anyone -- not that anyone wants to be treated. she learns, shares, empathizes, lives with, learns some more.

hornstein's language is admirable in its consistent refusal to use the terminology of pathology, diagnosis, and difference. you learn from what she says, but you also feel yourself shifting paradigm (what a relief!) just reading how she says it. instead, she uses diversity, and, on occasion, giftedness as guiding ideas. she does not deny the presence of pain, but she seems to attribute a lot of it -- basing herself on what the voice hearers say about their experience -- to the way voice hearers are treated by mainstream psychiatry (mainstream here is almost redundant) and our disgracefully marginalizing, stigmatizing, and punishing culture of normalcy. she explains that, like the rest of us, voice hearers learn to act the way we expect them to, and once restored to normality (i.e. to acceptability and acceptance within a group of peers) they lose a lot of their self-abasement and strangeness.

one of the things that make this book so compelling is that hornstein writes beautifully. this book is a genuine treat to read. i cannot recommend it enough, to EVERYONE, and i'm sincerely looking forward to reading it all myself.