Product Details
Simon & Schuster UK, February 2011
Hardcover, 256 pages
ISBN-10: 1847377033
ISBN-13: 9781847377036
Description
On a cold February day two months after his 20th birthday, Henry waded into the lethally cold Newhaven estuary and almost drowned. The trees, he said, had told him to do it.
In Afghanistan, Patrick learned that Henry had been admitted to a hospital mental ward. Ten days later he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. With remarkable candour, Patrick writes of the seven years Henry has since spent almost entirely in mental hospitals. Schizophrenics are at high risk for suicide, and his parents live in constant fear for Henry's life.
The book also includes Henry's own account of his experiences. In these raw and eerily beautiful chapters he tells of his visions and voices, the sense that he has discovered something magical and profound. Together, Patrick and Henry's stories create one of the most nuanced and revealing portraits of mental illness ever written, and a stirring memoir of family, parenthood, and courage.
In Afghanistan, Patrick learned that Henry had been admitted to a hospital mental ward. Ten days later he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. With remarkable candour, Patrick writes of the seven years Henry has since spent almost entirely in mental hospitals. Schizophrenics are at high risk for suicide, and his parents live in constant fear for Henry's life.
The book also includes Henry's own account of his experiences. In these raw and eerily beautiful chapters he tells of his visions and voices, the sense that he has discovered something magical and profound. Together, Patrick and Henry's stories create one of the most nuanced and revealing portraits of mental illness ever written, and a stirring memoir of family, parenthood, and courage.
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“You close Henry’s Demons with a profound sense of gratitude for this family’s courage in sharing what they have endured and crafting it into something of use -- and of beauty.”
-- Daily Mail
"A gripping drama of family life in a maelstrom. The Cockburns bring home the rigors of major mental illness…This is a kind of war-and-peace story, with internal and external turmoil, hope, sabotage, and surprise. A mind-bending, heart-rending psychological classic."
-- Library Journal
"Henry's Demons offers a bifocal view of schizophrenia and its impact on a family. This myth-shredding, light-shedding account explores a condition that few present-tense 'insiders' have ever written about. Patrick Cockburn writes with a journalist's lucidity; Henry Cockburn's descriptions of how someone with schizophrenia sees the world recall certain cult-artists such as Bruno Schulz and Syd Barrett. A truly remarkable book, and a brave one."
-- David Mitchell, author of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Cloud Atlas
"This is, yes, a book about a serious mental illness, but it is much more -- it is a story of a father's love for a child and the ability of a desperately ill child to perceive the force of that love and use it as a source of strength. It is also a brutally honest account of parental missed signals and misunderstandings -- not surprising, though, given Patrick Cockburn's career of telling it as it is."
-- Seymour M. Hersh
"Just as Henry Cockburn's beautiful and ingenious paintings were a clue to his distraught mental state, so this intensely moving collaboration with his father and mother illustrates the ways in which suffering and trauma can be the gateway to love, solidarity, and even healing. There is poetry in this prose: the bipolarity of misery and exaltation that Blake understood."
-- Christopher Hitchens
"A compelling, powerful first person account of the gritty realities of living with serious mental illness. Patrick and Henry are utterly real."
-- Mark Vonnegut, M.D., author of Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So and The Eden Express
"Together, father and son illuminate how "madness" can be as generative as it is devastating. This is an inspiring testament to the power of family to save and sustain each other through adversity, one written with great humanity and grace. The tenderness and terror in these pages stayed with me for days. Touchingly, it is Henry who has the last word, and it is one of hope."
-- Claire Fontaine, coauthor of Come Back: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back
"Henry's Demons is the harrowing yet hopeful story of the descent into schizophrenia of UK journalist Patrick Cockburn's son Henry at age 20. Henry's self-reflections are the stuff of raw genius."
-- Elle
Yahoo! News, November 15, 2011
...times by a collection of poetry and once by a children's book. In the biography section, journalist Patrick Cockburn and his son Henry co-authored an account of the latter's struggles with paranoid schizophrenia in "Henry's Demons: Living ...
Yahoo! UK and Ireland, November 15, 2011
...times by a collection of poetry and once by a children's book. In the biography section, journalist Patrick Cockburn and his son Henry co-authored an account of the latter's struggles with paranoid schizophrenia in "Henry's Demons: Living ...
Guardian.co.uk, February 25, 2011
...Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx, Great House by Nicole Krauss and Henry's Demons by Patrick and Henry Cockburn "I've long harboured a literary crush on Annie Proulx. At her best she's a world-class stylist, her prose as richly moist ...
Observer, February 19, 2011
...Patrick (right) and Henry Cockburn: 'The latter's illness has brought them to a depth of understanding that they could not otherwise have known.' Photograph: Rob Murray There are two principal ways of understanding ...
The Scotsman, February 18, 2011
...Henry's DemonsBy Patrick Cockburn and Henry Cockburn Simon & Schuster, 256pp, £16.99 WHEN he was 20, Henry Cockburn heard some trees ask him to dance in the freezing waters of an estuary ...
Mail Online UK, February 3, 2011
...us have to cope with everyday problems (school, moods, friends, anxiety, broken hearts). But the distinguished foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn and his wife Jan faced a terrifying demon indeed: madness. Two months after his 20th ...
