Welcome To My Country by Lauren Slater, Hamish
Hamilton, 拢15.99, ISBN 0 241 13638 5
MOXI, a slight Vietnamese man, is missing three fingers and one testicle,
and wounds himself when 鈥渢he buses go up the street the wrong way or the holy
light speaks鈥�.
Joseph, a Princeton dropout and the child prodigy of an immigrant family from
Italy, gazes at the high school opposite his unit, scribbling compulsively in an
incoherent attempt to 鈥渕easure it鈥�, 鈥渟eparate it鈥� and 鈥渞ead and write
补驳补颈苍鈥�.
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Oscar, abused as a child, is trapped in a vicious circle of catatonia and
hallucinations.
Marie crams living into the brief and random respites from a paralysing
depression.
Welcome to the world of word salad, dissociation and self-mutilation as
Lauren Slater, once diagnosed as a 鈥渂orderline personality鈥� and now a practising
psychologist, introduces us to patients at a residence for chronic
schizophrenics and a nearby outpatient clinic.
In Welcome to My Country, Slater insists that the idea of a fence
between the sick and the well is illusory, stressing the emotional common ground
we all share. She claims that we can still recognise the coded strivings for
connection and intimacy which are at the core of mental illness and in the
鈥渄rought or deluge of dopamine鈥�. She sees our indestructible desire to repair
the rifts between ourselves and others as the basis for hope and optimism.
Slater鈥檚 writing is passionate and poetic, but she is high on a partial
release from pain. When she was discharged from the psychiatric hospital where
she was a patient, her records predicted that she would be back. They were
right. They did not predict, however, that she would be returning to the same
ward this time to assess a suicidal bulimic woman. So her inspiration is
understandable. It is justified. She creates, however, a central irony. Many of
Slater鈥檚 patients will remain stranded in the chilly sphere of psychosis, and it
is doubtful they will share her belief that they contribute to a picture of the
essentially indomitable human spirit. There lies the fence.
Welcome To My Country is, nevertheless, unmissable. It is a
refreshing escape from the ongoing battle between a medical model for mental
illness and the talking cures鈥攖he one accused of a failure to address a
patient鈥檚 emotional reality and the other of being medically naive. The book
simply considers the people we are so desperate to 鈥渢reat鈥� and notices what
we鈥檙e missing.