Overview

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 patients have managed to get their stories out, at least in disguised form. Today, in a vibrant underground net-work of psychiatric survivor groups all over the world, patients work together to unravel the mysteries of madness and help one another re-cover. Optimistic, courageous, and surprising, Agnes's Jacket 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. A vast gulf exists between the way medicine explains psychiatric illness and the experiences of those who suffer. Hornstein's luminous work helps us 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.

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9781594865442

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Reviews

Agnes's Jacket is an amazing psychological adventure story. Hornstein, an academic psychologist with the skills of a first-rate journalist, enters the world of the truly mad and comes out with profound lessons about her profession and herself. In a revolutionary break with therapeutic tradition, she says we need to listen to the voices these disturbed patients hear. But first we need to listen to her! Barbara Ehrenreich, best-selling author of Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America Riveting, revolutionary, and important--not to mention exquisitely written-- Agnes's Jacket tells us what we should have been doing all along. Joanne Greenberg, best-selling author of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden Agnes's Jacket is compelling and beautifully done and will, thank goodness, open people's eyes. Susie Orbach, author of The Impossibility of Sex: Stories of the Intimate Relationship between Therapist and Patient Agnes's Jacket is a useful, passionate, and well-informed book about the many meanings of madness, distinguished by its understanding of what madness is and feels like to those who experience it. Jay Neugeboren, author of Imagining Robert and Transforming Madness Gail Hornstein attacks the stigma attached to mental illness with enormous originality and imagination. The madness narratives she has discovered document with startling clarity the experience of those who've suffered at the hands of orthodox psychiatry. She has brought into the light a true literature of protest. Patrick McGrath, author of Spider and Trauma

Author Information

Gail A. Hornstein is a professor of psychology at Mount Holyoke College and author of To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World, the widely praised biography of pioneering psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. She divides her time between Holyoke, Massachusetts, and London.

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