On a cold February day two months after his 20th birthday, Henry Cockburn waded into the Newhaven estuary outside Brighton and tried to swim across, almost drowning in the process. The trees, he said, had told him to do it. Nearly halfway around the world, in Kabul, Afghanistan, journalist Patrick Cockburn learned that Henry, his son, had been admitted to a hospital mental ward and appeared to be suffering a mental breakdown. Ten days later, Henry was officially diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Thus begins Patrick and Henry's extraordinary account of Henry's steep descent into mental illness and of Patrick's journey towards understanding the changes it has wrought. With remarkable candour, Patrick writes of the seven years since, years Henry has spent almost entirely in mental hospitals. Schizophrenics are at high risk for suicide, and Patrick and his wife live in constant fear for Henry's life.
"Just as Henry Cockburn's beautiful and ingenious paintings were a clue to his distraught mental state, so this intensely moving collaboration with his father and mother illustrates the ways in which suffering and trauma can be the gateway to love, solidarity and even healing. There is poetry in this prose: the bipolarity of misery and exaltation that Blake understood." --CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS "Henry's Demons offers a bifocal view of schizophrenia and its impact on a family. This myth-shredding, light-shedding account explores a condition that few present-tense 'insiders' have ever written about. Patrick Cockburn writes with a journalist's lucidity: Henry Cockburn's descriptions of how someone with schizophrenia sees the world recall certain cult-artists such as Bruno Schulz and Syd Barrett. A truly remarkable book, and a brave one." --David Mitchell, author of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Cloud Atlas "This is, yes, a book about a serious mental illness, but it is much more -- it is a story of a father's love for a child and the ability of a desperately ill child to perceive the force of that love and use it as a source of strength. It is also 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. His writing as a father, however, is transcendent. He captures exquisitely the constant undercurrent of dread and hot shards of grief lodged in a parent's heart as he and his wife stand almost helpless in the face of their child's suffering. Son Henry's passages on his hospitalizations and of the visions and voices that expand his reality are alternately poignant, painful and magical. Together, father and son illuminate how "madness" can be as generative as it can be devastating. This is an inspiring testament to power of family to save and sustain each other through adversity, one written with great humanity and grace. The tenderness and terror in these pages stayed with me for days. Touchingly, it is Henry who has the last word, and it is one of hope." --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 'Henry is open about the fact that he smoked a lot of the drug between the ages of 14 and 19 and his father believes this may have played a part. Patrick confesses that when Henry became ill he was "astonishingly ignorant" about schizophrenia. "I soon learnt it is to mental health what cancer is to physical ailments," he says. The condition varies hugely from patient to patient. The symptoms include hallucinations and paranoia and are largely controlled by antipsychotic drugs. Yet in common with a lot of people with schizophrenia, Henry refused to take medication because he believed there was nothing wrong with him. "As far as he was concerned he was having some sort of spiritual awakening, which was at times exhilarating and at times magical all the same," says Patrick' 2 page feature interview, The Express 15/2 'The book's principal strength - and the reason, I think, why it doesn't belong in that debased subgenre, the "misery memoir" - is that it includes Henry's own testimony. In the preface, Patrick says he thought it important that his son be invited to "defend the reality of his experiences", or at least describe them from the inside. "Only someone suffering from this strange and terrible illness," he writes, "can describe what it is really like" New Statesman 14/2 '...it is never boring, and not only because Henry, a talented painter, has a beautiful mind - to borrow the title of Sylvia Nasar's book about the mathematician John Nash, who also suffered from schizophrenia. It's also a living, breathing book because nearly everyone in his shaggy, expressive family is worth getting to know' International Herald Tribune 10/2 'A brave and moving portrait of mental illness and its devastating effect, told with equal honesty by both father and son. Unusual in presenting an account from the point of view of the sufferer, Henry's account of his own condition flirts with the sense that there is something almost magical going on in his life' Belfast Telegraph 5/2 '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) 16/2 '...a frightening, gut-wrenching and fantastical story of a young man's voyage into madness...Patrick Cockburn, The Independent on Sunday's veteran foreign correspondent, applies his considerable journalist expertise to explaining his son Henry's illness, and tells the family's story elegantly. But Henry's own words leap out. His descriptions of visual, auditory and tactile hallucinations are so extraordinary and fanciful that they could be stories from a fairy tale...his writing is so vivid that you almost taste the dangerous mixture of fear and elation...Henry's Demons is not just a book for those with a personal or professional interest in mental illness. It is or anyone who appreciates good story-telling and good journalism, and for anyone curious to know what living with demons is really like' Independent on Sunday 20/2 'Patrick Cockburn is a foreign correspondent who has reported from war zones in Beirut, Iraq and Afghanistan. While he is covering the fall of the Taliban from Kabul in 2002, his talented, bright and amusing elder son Henry is a first-year art student at Brighton. Who is in more danger? The sad answer is Henry. The tress and the wind tell him to remove his clothes and swim in freezing water: fished out of the sea at Newhaven in February, he is taken to hospital and subsequently diagnosed with schizophrenia. This book is an account of the next seven years of Henry's life, both from his father's perspective and his own. The result is remarkable, as important an addition to our understanding of altered mental states as William Styron's memoir of depression, Darkness Visible, or the work of Ky Redfield Jamison, who writes about bipolar disease, or Oliver Sacks' extraordinary navigations through the secret realms of our brains. Like these, Henry's Demons never loses sight of the personality, the uniqueness, of the sufferer. It would be impossible not to like Henry, who is candid, touching and often funny...Anyone lucky enough to read this book will wish that he continues to get better, and to write' The Spectator 19/2 'Candid and moving account by father and son of the latter's struggle with schizophrenia' Must Reads (x2) The Sunday Times 20/2 'I read this book, page by page, with a heart-thumping sense of recognition...And if there is a more lucid contemporary rendition of the experience of fully florid, schizophrenic psychosis than Henry's short, precise chapters in this book, I have not come across it. What makes Henry's writing so remarkable is that he remembers with precision both real events and the delusional ones that accompanied them. And, should you doubt a particular recollection, you need only cross-reference with his reporter-father's account of the same events...This is truly an account of living with schizophrenia from the outside and the inside. It is a dispatch from the ultimate domestic war zone, a journal of suffering, a guide for others in similar distress, and a work of literary power...Henry's illness has brought them both to a depth of filial understanding that - though they would never have chosen this path - they could not otherwise have know' The Observer 20/2 'Schizophrenia's scary and violent connotations are something we'd rather not think about. To be confronted with it in your own child, is a terrifying prospect. But that is what happened to Patrick Cockburn and here he and his son Henry, who has spent the last 10 years being cared for in institutions, tell what it is like to live with the illness. Patrick tells of the pain of witnessing his son's suffering and Henry describes the disease from the inside, relating how it feels when trees speak to him. As a parent it is painful to read, yet ultimately delivers a sense of optimism. As Henry, who now lives in a halfway house, says, the trees still speak to him but they give him hope' Press Association review 12/2 'Henry's Demons is an exceptional book written by a father and son. The father is Patrick Cockburn, award-winning foreign correspondent. The son is Henry Cockburn, talented artist and schizophrenic, who has spent most of his adult life in mental hospitals. Patrick writes his chapters with a brilliant journalist's clarity and brings to this incredibly difficult subject an unflinching gaze...Henry's chapters are unusual, vivid, truly absorbing and moving, and make up the heart and soul of this book' The Lady 22/2 'Henry's Demons is delicately constructed. It's a book of moments...the power of brave confession combined with skilful research...outstanding double memoir' The Scotsman 19/2 'Cannabis can alter your mind. Just ask my son Henry' Column, Independent on Sunday 5/6 'Cockburn's account of his son's illness is clear and journalistic. He writes of the unremitting anxiety generated by being told on assignment in Iraq of yet another breakdown , and of the disastrous impacts of successive government policies on mental health provision... Henry's Demons is probably the most vivid account you will ever read of what it is to live with a mental illness' Literary Review
Shortlisted for Costa First Novel Award 2011.
Title: Henry's demons
Subtitle: Living with Schizophrenia, a father and son's story
Contributors:
By (author)
Patrick Cockburn
;
By (author)
Henry Cockburn
ISBN 13: 9781847398598
ISBN 10: 1847398596
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Ltd
Imprint: Simon & Schuster Ltd
Publication Date: 8/12/2011
Place of Publication:
London,
United Kingdom
Edition:
BIC Subjects:
Biography & autobiography
NBS Classification: Coping with Problems & Illness
Dewey Classification:
616.8980092
(DC23)
;
616.8980092
(DC22)
Format: Paperback
Pages: 256
Height: 198mm
Width: 130mm