In this short article introducing her forthcoming book: The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in our Times, Barbara Taylor describes her experiences of living in Friern Barnet mental asylum. If the article is any indication, the book should be fascinating. The piece focusses on the friendships developed in psychiatric wards, something that Taylor feels has been totally neglected by researchers. As Taylor describes:
Magda suffered terribly from black depression yet nearly always she would pull herself together to be with me. Usually I did the same for her. The obligations of friendship trumped madness – and this in itself could be a form of healing.
it may be that the friendships developed on psychiatric wards can be an essential part of patients’ recoveries. Yet as mental health professionals we often seem confused as to whether to encourage such relationships, and indeed are sometimes very ambivalent. We may often fail to capitalise on the potential healing ability of our patients’ relationships. To my knowledge, we know little about whether these relationships are sustained out of hospital and what they mean to our clients. Yet we know that having good social support is a key factor that mediates recovery (for instance in bipolar disorder), and we know that serious mental illness commonly wreaks havoc on a person’s social networks (e.g. this study looking at the impact of psychosis on social support), so we really should know…