A review by andintothetrees
The Heartland: Finding and Losing Schizophrenia by Nathan Filer

5.0

An excellent book: well-written (with a little humour here and there), backs up its claims with research and covers an interesting topic. Nathan Filer is a mental health nurse and uses schizophrenia as the starting point to look at various issues within mental health and its treatment, by combining personal accounts with related discussion. It's particularly interesting that he chooses to look both at the conventional, Western view of mental health and its treatment and views more aligned with the "anti-psychiatry" movement. So there is discussion about how diagnoses are arrived at by observing symptoms and giving labels to those which tend to cluster together - it's a lot more arbitrary than diagnosing a health condition which has a clear microbial cause or can be seen on scans and such - and whether these labels mean anything beyond describing symptoms (I know some people find their diagnoses very helpful though, so I'm not taking sides here). There is analysis of schizophrenia within a wider social context and how race and poverty may affect diagnosis and the experience of mental health issues. He also explains how psychosis can feel to those experiencing it, and talks about treatment options and how anti-psychotics in particular have a lot of unwanted side effects - to the point where people who have been unwell for a long time may in fact be unwell at least partly because of their medication (though, as with diagnoses, he acknowledges that medication can have a vital role to play for some people). The only thing that was perhaps missing from this book was a look at how mental health is approached by non-Western medicine, but the author does say that he set out only to look at a Western (primarily UK based) context, so that's fair enough, though he does throw in at the end the interesting fact that people who have an episode of psychosis outwith Western healthcare systems are less likely to have a relapse of their condition.