Congratulations Gail!

 

Agnes’s Jacket
A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness
Gail A. Hornstein

 

Reading and Book Signing
Odyssey Bookshop, South Hadley, MA
March 26 • Thursday • 7 pm

Today, in a vibrant underground network of “psychiatric survivor groups” all over the world, patients work together to unravel the mysteries of madness and help one another recover. Optimistic, courageous, and surprising, Agnes’s Jacket (on sale starting March 17; $25.95; Hardcover) takes us from a code-cracking bunker during World War II to the church basements and treatment centers where a whole new way of understanding the mind has begun to take form.

 

“Agnes’s Jacket takes readers on a mesmerizing journey ...  Every page is animated by    Hornstein’s curiosity, her candor, and her evident empathy for those who have bravely welcomed her into their lives.”
Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America

 

Free and open to the public.  Call (413) 534-7307 to reserve a space.   If you can’t attend, a signed book can be reserved for you.

 

After being deemed mentally ill for over 32 years, I'm now learning what it is to be "normal". After 32 years of psychiatric units, psych meds, psychodrama, individual and group therapy, etc... I've been given a clean bill of mental health (except for PTSD).

Now, this does not mean I am no longer seeing a therapist. I am being followed by the Chemical Dependency Rehabilitation Program (CDRP) at Kaiser Permanente. I have over 9 months clean; and I'm learning to be a responsible adult. I was once asked what the difference is between the care I'm getting now compared to the care I was receiving (through the department of Psychiatry)? I can sum it up in one word, "accountability."

12 Shades Of Snow

Katrina's Speakout

Chaya's Narpa talk

I began to be able to face myself after reading the Preface to The Myth of Mental Illness by Dr. Szasz, born 1920 in Hungary. I could look at what happened to me as problems in living and that these were moral and not medical problems. 

Two security guards and several nurses came at me and attacked me. A doctor came in and shot me in my leg with meds I did not consent to. I sustained in juries to my back, head, face, chest, arms, legs and ankles. They also had help my mouth closed and pinched my nose so I couldn’t breath. 

Oryx Cohen is Director of the the Support Coalition International (SCI)'s Oral History Project. The Project involves collecting stories from psychiatric survivors, consumers, and ex-patients about their experiences in the mental health system: powerful stories of recovery, survival, resistance, and self-determination.

During the 1990s I worked as an outpatient clinician at the ServiceNet facility on Pleasant Street. While I enjoyed my professional contact with folks who came in for counseling support, I resigned the job not only because I found the working conditions oppressive (e.g.- lack of pay for any of the work I did other than the eyeball-to-eyeball contact with clients, and repeated decreases in the hourly wage of clinicians like me, repeated increases in the amount of paperwork required), but also because I found that my ability to interact with clients in meaningful, respectful ways, and to deliver therapeutic services based on relational and ecological theories was severely impaired due to conditions and practices at ServiceNet.

Well that little qualifier was inserted before I started talking because even within the Freedom Center, one of the wonderful things about this group of people is that we are able to tolerate many differences of opinion among one another. Which makes us a model that is markedly different from the medical establishment and the psychiatric establishment, which can only tolerate one model of interpretation.