Review
Janet Love's book Psychosis in the Family stands with such extraordinary works as Milner's 'The Hands of the Living God', and Dorman's Dante's Cure in evoking the experience of psychosis. But this time it is seen from within the family of the sufferer, particularly from the mother's point of view, herself a psychotherapist, yet as a mother exposed as totally as anyone could be to the disintegrating impact of psychosis, yet also paradoxically healing and regenerative. This amazingly vivid account grips the attention from start to finish, evoking poignantly what so many have experienced: the sheer excruciating, unfathomable, ungraspability of the experience and nature of psychosis on any single model. The devastation wrought by the inadequacies and bureaucratic closedness of our mental care systems is painfully articulated, yet it is not anti-psychiatric, and one of the heroes is a psychiatrist. Familial, and intergenerational, fault lines are agonisingly evoked, yet without going down the 'schizophrenogenic family' model. This is a book full of pain, full of madness, yet full of sanity. Psychotherapy is affirmed, but does not get off scot-free either! It is both a clarion call about the failures of our services, yet an awesome message of hope and overcoming! --Heward Wilkinson, UKCP Fellow, Chair of UKCP Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapy Section, Integrative Psychotherapist, Psychiatric Nurse and author of The Muse as Therapist: a New Poetic Paradigm for Psychotherapy
Product Description
This is a book written not just by a professional transpersonal psychotherapist but by someone who has walked the heart-rending path and experienced the psychological trauma of loving someone in psychosis; psychosis which still remains the greatest taboo in society today, together with its implicit diagnosis of a lifelong sentence of medication and no cure. It is in the main a personal and moving narrative of a mother looking to help her son avoid such a lifelong sentence of medication whilst trying to research holistic resources and alternative approaches for treatment at the same time as negotiating the vagaries of the current mental health system. It is often a tale of despair and frustration, yet also gives a compassionate voice. Transpersonal and transgenerational psychotherapeutic insights back up the personal narrative. It includes an accessible inquiry into how unconscious forces influence our mind, our bodies and the entire family system. Its hypothesis is that if we cannot understand our own unconscious responses how can we understand those of our loved ones in psychotic episodes? This is a highly readable, provocative weave of story and theory, one of the great untold stories of our time.
