Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing

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He is blessed, as when he was spiralling ever upwards before admission, with friends who keep in touch, who send thoughtful gifts, who make long journeys to visit. A fantastic book that is really an eye opening education into mental health services in modern day UK.

Heavy Light by Horatio Clare | Waterstones Heavy Light by Horatio Clare | Waterstones

The second is about his time in hospital and his diagnosis and the third is about his experiences when he was discharged and the challenges he made to his diagnosis. And he had significantly less concerns about using cannabis prior to his illness which is also a mind altering substance! As someone who has struggled with this illness my whole life I can’t recommend it enough as an opening into understanding how painful and misunderstood it is and how inadequate the treatment currently is.The next part described his time on the ward and the last bit was a mixture of his personal recovery and treatment plan as well as a dive into the current systems and thinking in mental health care today. These songs capture the watershed moment when your throat closes up, your head cools off, and your tears run dry: It is when you enter what can only be described as a zone of weightless grief. State House (It’s a Man’s World),” is a soured reimagining of the Ronettes’ “ Be My Baby,” with a hallucinatory kick drum and a layer of dense noise that feels like watching the third rail on the subway catch fire in half-time.

Heavy Light Album Review | Pitchfork U.S. Girls: Heavy Light Album Review | Pitchfork

She is art-pop’s own Orpheus, singing about the end of the world as she watches everyone she knew and loved disappear from her field of vision. Many people make time to talk with him when asked afterwards about his experience, their involvement in it, or with our approach more generally to mental illness - from the Chief Superintendent of police in the area and NHS management, to those trialling new strategies or critiquing old ones, to a ward nurse and the social worker who effected his section. It is such an unusual ordeal for most of us to comprehend, that shifting of reality and otherness of existing. Peppered through the record are three potent sound collages, fugues of overlapping voices that speak about the experiences they had when they were young and malleable. Heavy Light is Horatio Clare's description of his experience being committed to a hospital after having a mental break.Clare has a clear point of view - he is against prescribing drugs for mental health issues unless they are proven to have positive effects - but he works hard to show how tormenting it can be for loved ones (like his partner) when a patient refuses treatment. Pitchfork may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. I can't remember reading a memoir before about somebody going mad, so that felt fresh and novel, and the section in the mental hospital is equally readable. In particular, the moment when he is in the gallery, when he feels like everyone around him knows he is from the psychiatric hospital, that everyone is hyperaware of him. Parts here use a strategy of giving us Clare’s recollection of events in counterpoint with his partner’s rather more candid assessment.

Heavy or Light? | Jack Hartmann Measurement Song Is It Heavy or Light? | Jack Hartmann Measurement Song

pretty much immediately removes all the delusions (other, arguably, than that he is perfectly fine) During the later section of the book where he rightly questions many of our models and practices, he doesn't seem to reflect at all on this occurrence. It's no wonder that Clare is especially skeptical of prescription drugs as a treatment for people suffering mental health issues. The second part deals with his understandable desire to know more about mental health provision and the drugs, prescribed and un-prescribed, he took. It rather gave the impression that all psychiatrists are interested in his prescribing medication which felt extremely unfair as that is a profound misrepresentation. To the reader, privy to his thoughts, he is clearly 'mad' but as is clear from the account and his much later discussions with those involved, he was also skilled at withholding all his perceptions from others.It was only when he became a danger to himself or others (namely his partner and children) that he could be involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward in Wakefield. Very compelling, particularly the first part in which Clare details his mania and psychotic breakdown. Heavy Light taps into a deep well of pop music, the product of someone who listens to ’60s girl groups and Bruce Springsteen records with equal passion. Many people do not want therapy and look to a medication just to reduce some of the distress they’re experiencing. Sadly it does not represent many of the people I see in my work as a Clinical Psychologist, but his story speaks to the potential healing powers of community, kindness, nature and careful listening.