Description

By Patsy Gifford

ISBN: 9781849910385
Published: 2008
Pages: 77
Key Themes: autobiography and poetry, paranoid schizophrenia, mental hospitals, treatments, strength, recovery

Description

My story is the personal account of my life through a middle class background, achievements, tragedy, happiness and personal struggle with my fathers Victorian type attitudes and beliefs, as well as living with the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia at the age of 22, and subsequent years of mental hospitals and treatments.

The assumptions of being different and the difficulties I encountered throughout my life have been put down to being born with schizophrenia. To many I was an illness, not an ordinary human being which I found difficult to cope with.

From adolescence to middle age I have been isolated with the causes of my illness but with the help of some wonderful friends and a very caring and supportive Counsellor, I have now begun to unravel the mysteries of my mental illness, and this book I hope, will tell a truthful, meaningful and therapeutic account of my life.

My early years were happy with plenty of love and security. Brought up in Corstorphine, a residential area in Edinburgh, I was accustomed to comfort and kindness from my family freedom and a good education at a private school.

My adolescence and teenage years were blighted by abuse, mental and sexual and I was put on tranquillisers at the age of 14. My sister fell pregnant at age 17. She was 5 years older than me and my Dad totally rejected her for many, many years.

I became really ill at the age of 21 following a split with a boyfriend and my family and spent several months in a mental hospital in a catatonic state.