Henry's Demons: Living with Schizophrenia, a Father and Son's Story - Rilegato

`A myth-shredding, light-shedding account explores a condition that few present-tense 'insiders' have ever written about . . . A truly remarkable book, and a brave one' --David Mitchell, author of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Cloud Atlas

`Intensely moving . . . There is poetry in this prose: the bipolarity of misery and exaltation that Blake understood' --Christopher Hitchens

`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

`Patrick Cockburn brings his formidable skills as a journalist to a still-misunderstood disease that touches millions . . . The tenderness and terror in these pages stayed with me for days' --Claire Fontaine, coauthor of Come Back: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back

`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

'A book about serious mental illness, but it is much more -- it is a story of a father's love for a child' --Seymour M. Hersh

'...a heart-breaking, candid account of his schizophrenia - is an act of valour on both their parts' --The Sunday Times, February 6, 2011

'...a profound sense of gratitude for this family's courage...and crafting it into something of use - and of beauty' --Daily Mail, February 4, 2011

'...brilliantly written account of a devastating illness' --Metro, February 2, 2011

'Henry's chapters...are written with a vivid, child-like truthfulness' --The Guardian, February 5, 2011

'In his sensitivity and delirium Henry resembles the young son in Nabokov's "Signs and Symbols"'
--The New York Times, February 13, 2011

"The book's principal strength...is that it includes Henry's own testimony" --New Statesmen, February 14, 2011

"...it is never boring...a living, breathing book because nearly everyone in his shaggy, expressive family is worth getting to know' --International Herald Tribune, February 10, 2011

"...Henry's account of his own condition flirts with the sense that there is something almost magical going on in his life' --Belfast Telegraph, February 5, 2011

"This joint father-son account of living with schizophrenia will ease the path of affected families while it moves and informs other readers"
--I (mini-Independent), February 16, 2011

'...a frightening, gut-wrenching and fantastical story of a young man's voyage into madness' --Independent on Sunday, February 20, 2011

'... Henry's Demons never loses sight of the personality, the uniqueness, of the sufferer... candid, touching and often funny...' --The Spectator, February 19, 2011

'...if there is a more lucid contemporary rendition of the experience of fully florid, schizophrenic psychosis... I have not come across it.' --The Observer, February 20, 2011

`Candid and moving account by father and son of the latter's struggle with schizophrenia' --Must Reads (x2) The Sunday Times, February 20, 2011

'Patrick tells of the pain of witnessing his son's suffering... yet ultimately delivers a sense of optimism' --Press Association, February 12, 2011

'Patrick writes his chapters with a brilliant journalist's clarity... Henry's chapters... make up the heart and soul of this book' --The Lady, February 22, 2011

'Henry's Demons is delicately constructed... the power of brave confession combined with skilful research... outstanding double memoir' --The Scotsman, February 19, 2011

'Moving and harrowing'
--The Times, 2 July 2011

[I]t is a startling account of mental illness from within and without. Cockburn Senior provides the timeline, context and guilt-laden self-questioning, but it is Henry s simple eloquence that take the reader in to an unknown world, dangerous, horrifying, funny and wretched by turns. --Independent

A war reporter s clear-eyed document of his son s schizophrenia alternates with the young man s strangely beautiful world view. What could be purely painful is uplifting and vital reading --The Sunday Telegraph

On a cold February day two months after his 20th birthday, Henry Cockburn waded into the freezing water of Newhaven estuary outside Brighton and tried to swim across, almost drowning in the process. Voices, he said, had told him to do it.
Nearly halfway round the world in Afghanistan journalist Patrick Cockburn learned from his wife Jan that Henry, their son, had been admitted to a hospital mental ward and appeared to be suffering a mental breakdown. Ten days later, Henry was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Thus begins Patrick and Henry's extraordinary account of Henry's rapid descent into mental illness and of Patrick's journey towards understanding the changes in his son.
With striking candour, Patrick writes of the seven years since, years Henry has spent almost entirely in mental hospitals. Victims of schizophrenia are at high risk of committing suicide or killing themselves by accident and Patrick and Jan have lived in constant fear for Henry's life.
A unique feature of the book is Henry's own raw and beautiful chapters describing his psychosis from the inside. He relates with great vividness what it is like to hear trees and bushes speaking to him or voices ordering him to escape into the night or plunge into freezing water where he might die. He tells of the waves of unexplained anxiety and guilt which at times have threatened to overwhelm him and his long battle to survive.
Together, Patrick's and Henry stories create one of the most compelling and nuanced portraits of mental illness ever written and an insight into the courage it takes to survive it.
£16.99
Photo of authors TK)
Patrick Cockburn is Iraq correspondent of the Independent. He was awarded the 2005 Martha Gellhorn prize for war reporting, the James Cameron Award in 2006 and the Orwell prize in 2009. His book The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq was short-listed for National Book Critics Circle Award in 2007 and he is the author of Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq.
Henry Cockburn was born in 1982 and went to King's School Canterbury, Wimbledon Art College and Brighton University. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2002 and has spent the following years in mental hospitals. He currently lives in a half-way house in Lewisham.