It seems more personally revealing and more down to earth, if that makes any sense, and the 4 featured cases (I’m still unsure if they’re entirely fictitious or just tweaked to protect the identity of those involved) are just fascinating and very raw. At first I hate the narrator because she expect the impossible: cure and help all her patient but then I realized if I were in her position, I probably thinking the same way. There she lay, refusing to die, until she choked on her blood. The woman who had beaten her was sentenced to only three years for manslaughter with diminished responsibility. She had her baby in prison and was out within eighteen months. De grote dingen kunnen wij mensen meestal wel verdragen, maar het zijn juist de kleinste veranderingen in ons functioneren die vaak de grootste betekenis hebben en tot de ergste wanhoop leiden.”

The Skeleton Cupboard: Stories From a Books similar to The Skeleton Cupboard: Stories From a

Even now, I’m known for being a specialist in child and particularly adolescent mental health. Often, it’s around 15 that that “help me” moment comes.’How did you get here? Why now? What is your story and how would you like it to continue? For 25 years, psychologist Prof Tanya Byron has been asking these questions of her patients to help them ‘make that journey from chaos to clarity’. Over three years I was given six six-month placements, structured to provide a complete training experience across the age span and full spectrum of mental health issues by the time I qualified. Oh, it was terrible,’ she recalls. ‘The press were hanging around because he was a well-known television director. At 15, you are meant to be: “Yay, I’m going to change the world” and instead there I was looking at this mass of blood.’ In that moment I became the rational coper. My darling father howled, but I just shut down and began to try and understand how and why. She’s meant to be a psychologist. And okay, at that time, there’s some leeway: trans people weren’t as well-accepted and understood, and she was just beginning her career as a psychologist. But she didn’t write the book at the beginning of her career, although goodness knows the naivete sometimes makes it seem like it. She should’ve known better.

The Skeleton Cupboard: The making of a clinical psychologist

I really didn't warm to our narrator. She was whiny, childish and arrogant. Was she writing in the voice or a 21-25 year old or what? Honestly, I don't care - I just found her a right pain. Condescending about nurses and downright weird when it came to descriptions of her three girls, "The Lovely Rosie" must have been mentioned four or five times. The patient, fashion designer Tom had to spell it out - "we are not friends". Some of the people she describes in this book are unforgettable. Ray the sociopath who manipulates everyone. Tom who is HIV positive and doesn’t have long to live. Imogen who at twelve has seen more of the evil side of human nature than many will see in a lifetime. Mollie – bright, intelligent and with the whole world at her feet and who wants to starve herself to death because her body is too fat. Harold – highly educated, who survived the horrors of the concentration camps only to slide into dementia in later life. I first became fascinated by the frontal lobes of the human brain when I saw my grandmother’s sprayed across the skirting board of her dark and cluttered house. I was fifteen. The entire book, I get the uneasy subtle sense that the author is channeling these "inspired" characters to indirectly compliment herself. In the first book the sociopath compliments her amazing blue eyes, her facial structure etc. over and over and over and over again. Then in other scenes people tell her how pretty she looks, could be a model, etc. Even in the case that people did tell her this in real life, I do not see any purpose in her consciously deciding that it was a worthy conversational topic to include into this book other than to praise herself. This book should have been really interesting, but it was sort of meh. I went into it knowing that these stories were fictional (despite being classified as nonfiction..), but that just made the stories seem really contrived. In each story, she has a critical, life-changing role. Each story is also neatly presented and as soon as diagnosis or cure or a big revelation happens, the story ends and we're on the next one. No real depth- they come off as sanitized; hardly any mess. Although I liked a few of the stories, some of them were too much. The relationship with the world-famous fashion designer? Weird.In the epilogue, the author talks about how she intentionally wrote the book in a younger, arrogant and naive version of her. Fair enough. But as a 24 (I really forgot and cannot be bothered to remember her age) year old master's student doing her dissertation, I highly doubt that her cognitive process and vocabulary was that of a 14 year old. Here are just a few examples of her weird narration: I understand that Tanya Byron wrote this book from the point of view of her 22-year-old self, but she comes across as arrogant and unlikeable. If I knew nothing about psychotherapy prior to reading this book, I would be terrified to accept treatment from a mental health trainee. As a clinical psychology student myself, there are a few things I feel I must point out. Alzheimer's is always heart-breaking, but the poor man, Harold, described in this book, is more so than anything I have ever read. Because Alzheimer's leaves old memories intact, a survivor of Auschwitz concentration camp is doomed to relive his time there, the present having left him. He was a German Jew who after the war became a famous scientist in London who suffered terribly from PTSD and couldn't stand in line or bear uniforms. Hoe houd je je staande in een wereld van prestatiedruk, geluksterreur en idioot hoge verwachtingen?

The skeleton cupboard by Dr Tanya Byron Review: The skeleton cupboard by Dr Tanya Byron

It was a wild place a place of heavenly debauchery. Beautiful men wanting beautiful men and beautiful women watching those excellently sexy girls who wanted something more than the sexy boys.De verhalen van Imogen, Paul en Harold grepen me naar de keel en op het einde van ieder hoofdstuk dacht ik inderdaad telkens ‘niets is wat het lijkt’. Je zet je personages met heel erg veel respect neer en daar heb ik alleen maar bewondering voor. OK, to be honest, I am not entirely sure that my grandmother’s brains were on the skirting board when I went into her house that day at the age of fifteen. Is that a direct memory or something I told myself later on? In fact, I’m not sure I remember much of that day at all except two things: a massive bloodstain on the carpet and my father making a noise like an animal caught in a trap. The Skeleton Cupboard is much more than just a collection of case studies though. As Byron recounts her interactions with patients she also reveals her personal struggles as a somewhat naive and inexperienced young woman expected to treat patients presenting with a wide range of mental health issues. Byron admits that she often felt out of her depth, anxious about her treatment plans and her ability to help those in her care. Her own 'stuff', including the murder of her grandmother, occasionally interfered with her judgement and Byron sometimes found it difficult to let go of a patient when it was time to move on. I really liked Byron's honest revelations of her own failings and the difficulties she had in developing the skills needed to become a practitioner. It’s rare to have stories such as these told not from the point of view of the ‘patient’, but from the angle of the person ‘treating’ them, and it gives the book an entirely different depth to it. I have never read a book where I have had to physically put it down and compose myself several times. (It’s chapter two that killed me, you’ll see what I mean!) You really feel for the characters as if they were real, however, of course, due to the nature of the stories and Byron’s job, they are not real stories. This was hard for me to get my head around. Of course they are based on fact, on things that have, or could actually happen, but the characters feel so real it’s hard not to feel overly emotionally involved with them. I think, the hardest thing about this for me, was the realisation that these things have happened to people, and the ending may not have been as ‘happy’ as some of the resolutions in the book.