The Ghost Garden: Inside the lives of schizophrenia’s feared and forgotten Audiobook (Free)

A rare function of narrative non-fiction that illuminates a global most of us do not see: the daily lives of the severely mentally sick, who are medicated, marginalized, locked away and shunned.

Susan Doherty’s groundbreaking publication provides us a population of misplaced souls, ill-served by society, feared, shunted from locked wards to rooming houses to the roads to prison and again. For days gone by ten years, one particular who cycle in and out of the seriously ill wards of the Douglas Institute in about The Ghost Backyard: Inside the lives of schizophrenia’s feared and ignored Montreal, have found out a friend in Susan, who volunteers on the ward, and then follows her friends out into the world as they struggle to get through their days.

With their complete cooperation, she brings us their stories, which concern the methods we consider people with mental disease on every web page. The spine of the book is the existence of Caroline Evans (not really her real name), a woman in her early sixties whom Susan offers known since she was a shiny and sunny school girl. Caroline had formed a close camaraderie with Susan and distributed stories from her life; through her, we knowledge what living with schizophrenia as time passes is really like. She’s been through it all, including the way the justice program treats the significantly mentally sick: at one point, she believed that she could save her roommate in the devil by pouring boiling drinking water into her ear…

Susan interleaves Caroline’s story with vignettes about her other friends, human stories that reveal their hopes, their conditions, their personalities, their mankind. She’s found that if she can hang in through the initial ten to fifteen minutes of every espresso date with somebody in the hold of psychosis, after that true communication results. Their ‘madness’ isn’t otherworldly: rather it tells us something about how exactly they’re making it through their lives and what they’ve been through. The Ghost Backyard isn’t just touching, but carries a cargo of compassion and empathy.