Psychology Professor Publishes New Book on Mental

Newswise — Mount Holyoke College psychology professor Gail A. Hornstein has authored a new book, "Agnes's Jacket: A Psychologist's Search for the Meanings of Madness," published this month by Rodale Books. The book offers readers a provocative new perspective on mental illness and recovery based directly on patients' own accounts of their experiences.

Publishers Weekly has hailed "the fascinating avenues Hornstein pursues and the humanity and thoroughness of this exploration," saying the book makes "a serious contribution to critiques of contemporary psychiatry."

The title "Agnes's Jacket" comes from the story of a German seamstress, Agnes Richter, who was confined to an asylum in the late 1800s. There she constructed a jacket from pieces of the institutional uniform and painstakingly stitched a mysterious autobiographical text into every inch of the inside and outside of the jacket. For Hornstein, "The jacket precisely captures the fundamental conundrum of madness, an experience rich with symbolic meanings that are indecipherable by ordinary means."

"First-person accounts are essential to understanding seemingly 'irrational' phenomena like delusions or phobias," the author says. "Madness is more code than chemistry. If we want to understand it, we need translators--native speakers, not just brain scans."

Hornstein has long investigated personal testimonies of madness to determine what they can teach us about mental illness and its treatment. During the six years she spent researching and writing "Agnes's Jacket," she witnessed hundreds of patients telling their stories in a vibrant underground network of psychiatric "survivor groups" across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. In these peer support groups, patients help one another understand anomalous experiences like hearing voices and develop their own coping strategies to deal with emotional difficulties.

"There are real alternatives to the narrow, pessimistic views of mental illness we've so often heard," she says. "Unbeknownst to their physicians, thousands of patients have been quietly voting with their feet--weaning themselves off medications whose side effects are worse than the original symptoms, participating in peer support groups instead of attending day treatment centers, and joining together to analyze their shared experiences."

"Agnes's Jacket" helps bridge the gulf between the way medicine explains psychiatric illness and the experiences of those who suffer, guiding readers through the inner lives of those diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar illness, depression and paranoia. Joanne Greenberg, author of the widely-read "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden" " a fictional version of Greenberg's own experience with mental illness " praised the book.

"Riveting, revolutionary and important " not to mention exquisitely written " 'Agnes's Jacket' tells us what we should have been doing all along," said Greenberg.

Hornstein is also author of "To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World" (Free Press, 2000), the highly-praised biography of pioneering psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. To help foster the approaches described in her new book, she works with the Northampton, Mass.-based Freedom Center, a support and advocacy group for people diagnosed with mental illness, and the Western Massachusetts Recovery Learning Center in Holyoke, Mass., where for the past six months she has co-facilitated a Hearing Voices support group.

For more information, see: http://www.gailhornstein.com/http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/misc/profile/ghornste.shtml http://www.mtholyoke.edu/news/stories/5681191