Recovered, Not Cured: A Journey Through Schizophrenia

By Richard McLean

Book Overview

This very personal exploration of schizophrenia explores each stage, from the early signs and reactions from friends and family to seeking help and the challenges of recovery. McLean bravely shares his paranoid delusions and offers both a verbal and a visual experience by including digital artwork he created to help objectify and control his impulses and fears. As McLean relates his experiences step by step, issues of sexuality, identity, and drug abuse are discussed, along with the overarching issues relating to mental health and the medical profession. Messages from online posters who either have suffered from mental illness or have cared for the mentally ill are included throughout, adding more perspectives to the author's personal experiences. This powerful combination of words and pictures provides a unique and poignant insight into a hidden, internal world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1865089745
• ISBN13: 9781865089744
• Release Date: May 2005
• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

VERY good book.

GET this book for yourself and anybody you know that might be influenced by schizophrenia. This biography clearly describes the struggle the author has with schizophrenia. Reading this completely helped me understand the confusion I had about schizophrenia and explained behavior and circumstances in a very heartfelt and real way. I've purchased copies for everybody I know that wants to learn more about schizophrenia.

Lovely story

I like to read personal accounts of mental illness. This book is an artwork. It is a pleasure to hold, read, and look at. It is well organized, very entertaining with many drawings made at different times of the author's illness. I felt he was very honest, humble and friendly. I like the fact that he is a young writer. I guess the book was written when he was just 30 years old, so many young readers can identify with his art and music. There are many reasons he recovered. Among them his supportive family, supportive friends, he took up humble jobs along his illness even though having a university degree, modern medicines, he was able to balance the pros and cons of his medicine's side effects and keep taking them, ... [...].

A must read for anyone who is sufferer/friend/family of schizophrenia

A must read for all friends, relatives and sufferers of what we term 'Mental Illness'. Richard has successfully given of his own experience with his struggle through schizophrenia in a unique and vivid manner. He draws upon his talent as an artist/musician and the resource of the internet chat lines for fellow sufferers points of view and comments on what it is like to experience a psychotic illness. His drawings express emotions and a state of mind which words can not. Easy to read and unlike many other books on the subject the outlook for the sufferer is not all doom and gloom. Richard's story is living proof that there is a recovered 'normal' life from schizophrenia. Thankyou Richard as you have helped me immensely with my journey through schizophrenia.

Recovered, Not Cured

This book was an excellent tale of one individual's experience with schizophrenia. This book includes artwork from the author to help illustrate the kind of torment he experienced. I recommend this book to anyone interested in or experiencing schizophrenia.

Helpful and well put together

I read this book to get a better understanding of my brother, who is diagnosed schizophrenic and is obviously having a very hard time, though he rarely talks explicitly about what's happening to him. I was glad to stumble upon a book written by someone with schizophrenia (as opposed to a doctor or researcher). I think this 'inside view' has been really helpful in my coming to understand my brother better, so that I can be supportive towards him and catch warning signs of when he's entering a delusional episode. I found this book to be very well written. It would likely be interesting even to people who don't have schizophrenic loved ones. The author has included his own artwork interspersed throughout the book as well as poems and notes he wrote while he was delusional. The artwork is very interesting, the poems and notes are a bit disturbing, as you'd expect. It is heartening that though the author has a severe mental illness to deal with, he was able to put together such an excellent book.