Reviews
We’ll post an archive here of reviews for film, TV, radio and the published word that involve Mental and Emotional Health subjects.
__________________________________________________________________
Take Shelter
That great actor Michael Shannon (Boardwalk Empire, Revolutionary Road) brings his brand of lantern-jawed intensity to the role of Curtis, a cash-strapped family man and building site worker in Ohio, troubled by apocalyptic visions in the form of looming tornados.
Click here for full review.
With thanks to The Telegraph online.
______________________________________
The Beaver
The Beaver is directed by Jodie Foster and stars Mel Gibson. Gibson plays Walter Black, a CEO of a toy company, whose wealth and loving family haven’t stopped him falling into a deep depression.
Click here for full review.
With thanks to Guardian online.
______________________________________
Me, Myself and Them
Click the link: Me, Myself, and Them to buy from Amazon.
Me, Myself, and Them provides a riveting peek into the world of schizophrenia for parents like me who yearn for understanding. For young people with schizophrenia, like our son, the book orients a frightening illness. For both families and persons with mental illness, this book is laced with hope, something in short supply in most other books
___________________________________________________________
The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness
Click this link to buy from Amazon: The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness
At seventeen Lori Schiller was the perfect child – the only daughter of an affluent, close-knit family. Six years later she made her first suicide attempt, then wandered the streets of New York City dressed in ragged clothes, tormenting voices crying out in her mind. Lori Schiller had entered the horrifying world of full-blown schizophrenia. She began an ordeal of hospitalizations, halfway houses, relapses, more suicide attempts, and constant, withering despair. But against all odds, she survived. Now in this personal account, she tells how she did it, taking us not only into her own shattered world, but drawing on the words of the doctors who treated her and family members who suffered with her. In this new addition, Lori Schiller recounts the dramatic years following the original publication – a period involving addiction, relapse and ultimately, love and recovery. Moving, harrowing, and ultimately uplifting, THE QUIET ROOM is a classic testimony to the ravages of mental illness and the power of perserverance and courage.
_______________________________________________________________________
Your Voice in My Head by Emma Forrest
Click the link to buy from Amazon: Your Voice in My Head
Emma Forrest, an English journalist, was twenty-two and living in America when she realised that her quirks had gone beyond eccentricity. Lonely, in a dangerous cycle of self-harm and damaging relationships, she found herself in the chair of a slim, balding and effortlessly optimistic psychiatrist – a man whose wisdom and humanity would wrench her from the vibrant and dangerous tide of herself, and who would help her to recover when she tried to end her life. Emma’s loving and supportive family circled around her in panic. She was on the brink of drowning. But she was also still working, still exploring, still writing, and she had also fallen deeply in love. One day, when Emma called to make an appointment with her psychiatrist, she found no one there. He had died, shockingly, at the age of fifty-three, leaving behind a young family. Processing the premature death of a man who’d become her anchor after she’d turned up on his doorstep, she was adrift. And when her significant and all-consuming relationship also fell apart, she was forced to cling to the page for survival. A modern-day fairy tale of New York, Your Voice in My Head is a dazzling and devastating memoir, clear-eyed and shot through with wit. In a voice unlike any other, Emma Forrest explores breakdown and mania, but also the beauty of love – and the heartbreak of loss.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Me, Myself, and Them, Book Review
Click below for more information and to buy from Amazon.
Me, Myself, and Them: A Firsthand Account of One Young Person’s Experience with Schizophrenia (Adolescent Mental Health Initiative)Me, Myself, and Them: A Firsthand Account of One Young Person’s Experience with Schizophrenia (Adolescent Mental Health Initiative)
During his second semester at college, Kurt Snyder became convinced that he was about to discover a fabulously important mathematical principle, spending hours lost in daydreams about numbers and symbols. In time, his thoughts took a darker turn, and he became preoccupied with the idea that cars were following him, or that strangers wanted to harm him. Kurt’s mind had been hijacked by schizophrenia, a severe mental disorder that typically strikes during the late teen or young adult years. In Me, Myself, and Them, Kurt, now an adult, looks back from the vantage point of recovery and eloquently describes the debilitating changes in thoughts and perceptions that took hold of his life during his teens and twenties.
________________________________________________________
Peacock Film Review
John Skillpa, a quiet bank clerk living in tiny Peacock, Nebraska, prefers to live an invisible life. This might have to do with John’s secret: he has another personality no one knows about, a woman who each morning does his chores and cooks him breakfast before he starts his day. Then, in a moment, everything changes…
Peacock touches on some touchy subjects such as child abuse, cross dressing, prostitution, insanity and more.
Click here for full review.
With thanks to Unbiased Movie Reviews online.
_______________________________________________________
Inception Film Review
Christopher Nolan‘s new movie is a colossal digital artefact, a virtual reality sci-fi thriller set inside the dreaming mind, with brilliant architectural effects and a weirdly inert narrative inspired by Philip K Dick and Lewis Carroll. At some stage in the distant future, the technology of industrial espionage will allow snoopers to invade the dreams of CEOs and pinch commercially sensitive information.
Click here for full review.
With thanks to Guardian online.
_____________________________________________________
Shutter Island Film Review
What’s got into Martin Scorsese, muses Kate Muir as she endures Shutter Island, a sub-Hitchcock, sub-Tarantino horror fest?
In Shutter Island the director Martin Scorsese opens the film-noir casket and plays about with the contents — for his pleasure and at our expense. Set in an asylum for the criminally insane on an isolated, storm-lashed island, the movie is overloaded with gruesome scenes in saturated colour. Every horror cliché is there, from Nazi doctors to children’s corpses, rats, screaming violins and lunatics with stapled heads rusting behind bars. There’s not a moment’s respite from the melodrama, in a film with so many red herrings that it needs a fishing quota.
Click here for full review.
With thanks to Times online.
_____________________________________________________
Crazy Like Us By Ethan Watters
A new global phenomenon
Review by John T. Slania
Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche
Save for our popular culture and our fast food, there is little that the United States exports anymore. But move over Miley, Madonna and McDonald’s: America’s newest export is madness. At least, that’s the thesis of Ethan Watters’ Crazy Like Us.
______________________
Psychiatric Tales by Darryl Cunningham
Cunningham’s descriptions of illnesses such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are pretty bald, and you should come to his book expecting a lot of blood, sweat and tears. His drawings, too, are stark: he works in black and white, and his style is wilfully naive. Some of his faces consist only of two lines: the determined curve of cheek and jaw; a claw-like nose connected to a pair of narrow, unreadable eyes.
Click above to buy from Amazon.
__________________________________________________________
When Do I Get My Shoelaces Back?…..a diary of a psychotic breakdown.
Based on a book by Steve Lopez, a Los Angeles Times journalist, it deals with the plight of Nathaniel Ayres (Jamie Foxx), a homeless schizophrenic and gifted musician. Lopez (Robert Downey Jr) discovers him, playing Beethoven exquisitely on a violin with two strings and writes human-interest columns about him that capture the public’s imagination.
Estranged from his family, Lopez befriends Nathaniel, drawn to the state of grace in which he “receives” music, though wary of the discordant voices in his head. The question is: how much can Lopez help him?
This is not the story of a beautiful mind, but a darkly troubled one. The film does not deal in easy answers: it’s made clear that dealing with a schizophrenic will often be tough and exasperating. The Soloist has its imperfections, but its ambition trumps them.
Click here for full review
With thanks to the Telegraph online: www.telegraph.co.uk
__________________________________________________________________________
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl (Rider Books)
This is an inspirational book by a psychiatrist who survived imprisonment in various concentration camps during WWII. The book is split into two sections, the first an autobiographical account of some of his experiences and observations of his camp life, the second covers a psychotherapeutic method he developed using his experiences, called Logotherapy.
The descriptions in the first half of the book at first seem horrific, which of course they are, but as I flicked through the pages I found I didn’t pity Viktor anymore. He describes how he was stripped bare of his possessions – even his clothes were taken and he was given ill-fitting rags to wear. He was given very miniscule amounts of food and was forced to work in extreme conditions for twelve hours a day. Through all that, he observed how little people actually needed to sustain themselves. He believes the main reason people didn’t commit suicide, despite the fact that they knew they would probably be killed at some point, was that they had a meaning to carry on for (such as a loved one or an unfinished piece of work). As Frankl starts to discover he has a meaning to his life, pity diminishes to sympathy and his experiences seem more bearable.
This book isn’t for the faint hearted but it will definitely help put your life in perspective. It wasn’t written to document the horrors of concentration camps, but to prove that even in the absolute worst of circumstances; anyone can find a meaning in life, and from that the will to carry on.
Tash
_________________________________________________________________________________________
The impact of physical illness on mental health
Click here for the full article
