Description

Civil War in the Soul
By Jeremy Gluck

ISBN: 9781847478955
Published: 2009
Pages: 223
Key Themes: bi-polar, manic depression, auto-biographical, established novelist, poet and musician

I have read your book and I am impressed and obviously I relate. I hope it sells well because I am sure it will help many people. By Katy-Sara Culling, The Bipolar Foundation

Description

Novelist, poet and musician Jeremy Gluck draws on his experiences of growing up in post-War Canada in a breath-takingly beautiful and poignant account of his battle with bipolar disorder or manic depression. He contrasts a depiction of his descent into depression and madness with the narrative innocence of his childhood.

Victim of Dreams can help others to understand what it is like to develop, have and or survive a severe and enduring mental health condition. More than anything else service users want empathy. Manuals and guides are essential, good medical support crucial, medication crucial of course, but those with serious MH conditions are so plagued by feeling misunderstood and isolated that empathy is the key. Exploring in anecdotal and lay terms the genetic and environmental genesis of the disorder in me, the book is written in a highly professional literary style, including vivid memoir and especially penetrating accounts of depression and manic delusion, drawn largely from journals kept at the time and therefore vivid in their evocation of mania and depression and is a new kind of survivor book that eschews misery for memory and asks, again and again, searching questions about the nature of our lives, minds, memory and capacity to endure what is, after all, a part of ourselves seemingly set to destroy another, more benign part.