Make no mistake, this is an excellent book. It combines moving, realistic first-person accounts of Ms. Schiller's schizophrenia from the patient, her family and her psychiatrists. But it leaves out any didactic, direct teaching about schizophrenia. The working model here is "show, don't tell."
And that's great as far as it goes. Extending over a period of more than ten years, though, that lack of factual information about schizophrenia makes it less than totally realistic. Because all of the people involved, including Ms. Schiller, must have learned an awful lot along the way from reading or hearing about what little is known of this disease.
And to some extent that's frustrating for the reader. As one goes with the patient and everyone attending on her through the entire course of her long illness, one has many, many questions about mental disease that could have been answered in relatively brief fashion throughout the book. But that was not the course chosen by the participants or the writer. The book is still well worth reading, but the reader will have to look elsewhere for factual material about schizophrenia.
And that's great as far as it goes. Extending over a period of more than ten years, though, that lack of factual information about schizophrenia makes it less than totally realistic. Because all of the people involved, including Ms. Schiller, must have learned an awful lot along the way from reading or hearing about what little is known of this disease.
And to some extent that's frustrating for the reader. As one goes with the patient and everyone attending on her through the entire course of her long illness, one has many, many questions about mental disease that could have been answered in relatively brief fashion throughout the book. But that was not the course chosen by the participants or the writer. The book is still well worth reading, but the reader will have to look elsewhere for factual material about schizophrenia.
