Agnes's Jacket
A Psychologist's Search for the Meanings of Madness.Revised and Updated with a New Epilogue by the Author
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- $64.99
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- $64.99
Publisher Description
In a Victorian-era German asylum, seamstress Agnes Richter painstakingly stitched a mysterious autobiographical text into every inch of the jacket she created from her institutional uniform. Despite every attempt to silence them, hundreds of other psychiatric patients have managed to get their stories out, or to publish them on their own. Today, in a vibrant network of peer-advocacy groups all over the world, those with firsthand experience of emotional distress are working together to unravel the mysteries of madness and to help one another recover. Agnes’s Jacket tells their story, focusing especially on the Hearing Voices Network (HVN), an international collaboration of professionals, people with lived experience, and their families and friends who have been working to develop an alternative approach to coping with voices, visions, and other extreme states that is empowering and useful and does not start from the assumption that such people have a chronic illness.
A vast gulf exists between the way medicine explains psychiatric conditions and the experiences of those who suffer. Hornstein’s work helps us to bridge that gulf, guiding us through the inner lives of those diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar illness, depression, and paranoia, and emerging with nothing less than a new model for understanding one another and ourselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hornstein, a professor of psychology at Mount Holyoke, investigates personal testimonies of madness for what they can teach us about mental illness and its treatment. The author spent several years attending meetings of "survivors' " groups, such as the Hearing Voices Network in the U.K., whose members hear voices but reject the notion that they are mentally ill. In addition to these stories, Hornstein presents many forms of personal expression by those suffering from mental illnesses, including archived video recordings, writings through history and the artwork of the Prinzhorn collection (of which the eponymous jacket is an example), the basis for the modern understanding of "outsider art." Hornstein concludes that mental illness is primarily based in trauma, as opposed to the dominant view of biological and hereditary origins. Behind the psychiatric profession's attachment to such views she sees, as do other psychiatric dissidents, the profiteering influence of prescription drug companies. A wealth of compelling characters includes the eccentric and the heartbreakingly resilient. Despite some repetition of narrative detail, the fascinating avenues Hornstein pursues and the humanity and thoroughness of this exploration make a serious contribution to critiques of contemporary psychiatry.