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Living with Schizophrenia, A Father and Son's Story
Scribner
February 2011
On Sale: February 1, 2011
256 pages
ISBN: 1439154708
EAN: 9781439154700
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
On a cold February day two months after his twentieth
birthday, Henry Cockburn waded into the Newhaven estuary
outside Brighton, England, and nearly drowned. Voices, he
said, had urged him to do it. Nearly halfway around the
world in Afghanistan, journalist Patrick Cockburn learned
from his wife, Jan, that his son had suffered a breakdown
and had been admitted to a hospital. Ten days later, Henry
was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Narrated by both Patrick
and Henry, this is the extraordinary story of the eight
years since Henry’s descent into schizophrenia—years he has
spent almost entirely in hospitals—and his family’s struggle
to help him recover. With remarkable frankness, Patrick writes of Henry’s
transformation from art student to mental patient and of the
agonizing and difficult task of helping his son get well.
Any hope of recovery lies in medication, yet Henry, who does
not believe he is ill, secretly stops taking it and
frequently runs away. Hopeful periods of stability are
followed by frightening disappearances, then relapses that
bleed into one another, until at last there is the promise
of real improvement. In Henry’s own raw, beautiful chapters,
he describes his psychosis from the inside. He vividly
relates what it is like to hear trees and bushes speaking to
him, voices compelling him to wander the countryside or live
in the streets, the loneliness of life within hospital
walls, harrowing “polka dot days” that incapacitate him, and
finally, his steps towards recovery. Patrick’s and Henry’s parallel stories reveal the complex
intersections of sanity, madness, and identity; the vagaries
of mental illness and its treatment; and a family’s
steadfast response to a bewildering condition. Haunting,
intimate, and profoundly moving, their unique narrative will
resonate with every parent and anyone who has been touched
by mental illness.
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