Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing

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Clare's distrust of the drugs prescribed is so great that he decides to wean himself off his drugs without telling his partner, who is understandably terrified he'll start having delusions if he stops taking the drugs.

Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing

From hypomania in the Alps, to a complete breakdown and a locked ward in Wakefield, this is a gripping account of how the mind loses touch with reality, how we fall apart and how we can be healed - or not - by treatment.

It's no wonder that Clare is especially skeptical of prescription drugs as a treatment for people suffering mental health issues.

Heavy Light by Horatio Clare | Book review | The TLS Heavy Light by Horatio Clare | Book review | The TLS

Nor on his repeated assertion that he knows the triggers for his illness and 'just' needs to avoid them. The second part concerns his thoughts on pychiatry, psychotherapy and the overprescribing of anti psychotic drugs by psychiatrists.If you have ever come in contact with psychosis and wondered what the person was going through, or if you have suffered a psychotic episode, this book is a glimpse into that alternative reality.

Book review: Heavy Light, by Horatio Clare - The Scotsman Book review: Heavy Light, by Horatio Clare - The Scotsman

He is also interesting how his class and education help him elude services which probably wouldn’t happen for others. I had already read Horatio Clare's book, The Light in the Dark which was about him coming to terms with a diagnosis of a kind of extreme, SAD condition known as cyclothymia and how he attempts to weather a winter in the Yorkshire Dales. Two thirds of the way though he finds a psychiatrist who gives house room to Clare’s ideas on treatment and says ‘At last I was being listened to’. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to which drug was prescribed - Clare was expected to pick based on which side effects he thought he could handle.Shockingly, when he meets with his psychiatrist he is presented with a choice of three drugs and told to pick one. However, the last 100 pages or so goes off on a polemic against over-prescription, which is all very well, except the author's viewpoint is based very much on his own experience; just because the tablets didn't work for him doesn't mean that they don't work for other people.

Heavy Light Album Review | Pitchfork U.S. Girls: Heavy Light Album Review | Pitchfork

Listening to “Born to Lose”—with its surreal nod to Sam the Sham’s “ Wooly Bully”—feels like walking out of your body; a vibraphone solo spirals into dissonance and congas float like debris after a hurricane.pretty much immediately removes all the delusions (other, arguably, than that he is perfectly fine) During the later section of the book where he rightly questions many of our models and practices, he doesn't seem to reflect at all on this occurrence. By turns extraordinary, emotional and funny, it is worth a read even if madness isn't in your list of interests. The status and modus operandi of consultant psychiatrists perhaps another matter - there are some hints of Kafka, of Catch-22 here. I was struck, from his account of his time on the ward to the trendy but controversial trauma therapies later by the sheer value of *doing something* with one's hands whilst talking.