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9-13 September.
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AN EXTRACT FROM MY FORTHCOMING
"GIANT BOOK OF MADNESS"
As we approach at neck-breaking speed the third decade of the 21st century, so much is made of the word “narrative” that I am reluctant to use the term at all. I would rather simply state that I was deeply moved by witnessing my late, eldest brother’s descent into madness in the early 1970s and promptly hatched an irrepressible desire to find out what had happened to him.
Little did I know then that I would be sitting in a padded cell in Cape Town’s Valkenberg Mental Health Hospital in 1975, punctuated by six doses of shock treatment. When I finally clawed my way back to relative sanity, a marriage, two children, three cars, a Victorian House, and a high-powered job at the global Longman group (now Pearson Education), I had no expectation that I would have to go through the entire process again in the early 1990s (but without the same brutalities, other than crippling medication). My insistence on “working it out for myself” led to a painful divorce, bankruptcy, and deep despair to the point of suicide, but somehow or other, I muddled through to the more tranquil environment of the resort town on the eastern border of the Western Cape Province in South Africa, Plettenberg Bay, and the very slow discovery of a greater “peace that passeth all understanding”.
My approach to this work, however, is not that of an ardent evangelical or zealous missionary. It was born out of a simple desire to retell the story to some few folk who may have an interest in the matter. What follows, then, is divided like ancient Gaul into three parts: a brief series of historical narratives (in the true sense); an attempt at my own, necessarily autobiographical encounter with madness in the late 20th Century, and a further, far vainer attempt to make something of the fact that I have been without therapy and medication for over 20 years. Having no qualifications in the medical sciences whatsoever, I simply experienced madness on two
