Songs from the Black Chair: A Memoir of Mental Interiors
http://www.100md.com
《新英格兰医药杂志》
For those who work in mental health services, the best teachers are often those who are themselves mentally ill. Thus, personal accounts that bring us closer to the inner maelstrom of mental illness — books such as William Styron's Darkness Visible, Sylvia Nasar's A Beautiful Mind, Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, and now Charles Barber's equally eloquent and insightful Songs from the Black Chair — have long made important contributions to the field. In this multifaceted memoir, Barber interweaves an account of his own struggle with mental illness with stories of a childhood friend and the homeless men whom he later comes to counsel as a mental health professional. As the title suggests, the book is often less a typical memoir than a "song" — a free-flowing, lyrical, and imaginative story so absorbing that I finished it in one sitting.
As the book begins, 39-year-old Barber is commuting from his home in suburban New Jersey to a dingy basement office in the Bellevue Hospital Center's men's shelter in lower Manhattan, where he performs psychological assessments of new residents who come to sit in the simple black chair next to his desk. With his privileged background and Ivy League education, Barber is not supposed to be here, he tells us. Why, we wonder, is he here.
Early on, we learn that Barber is haunted by the suicide, nearly two decades before, of a childhood friend, Henry, at the age of 21. His recurring drive to unravel the mystery of Henry's despair, we learn, takes its place alongside other crippling, persistent thoughts as part of Barber's obsessive–compulsive disorder — an affliction that he has faced since childhood but managed to suppress and hide from others. By the end of his freshman year at Harvard, however, the intrusive thoughts that mark this disorder intensify and tear his world asunder. In the first half of the book, Barber describes his long struggle with obsessive–compulsive disorder and his eventual treatment and recovery.
Barber's ability to convey the experience of mental illness is striking. In one passage, he imagines Henry's final moments on the day he took his life at his family's farm in Massachusetts, in the Berkshires:
He walked over the patch of lawn in front of the farmhouse. He walked to the brown pond. Not a ripple on it. Flat. Without motion. Beyond the pond he saw the first line of naked trees, followed by more trees. . . . The trees, he thought, were like waves of soldiers, wave after wave of an oncoming army. . . . If you mowed down the first row, there'd always be another one to follow. He thought maybe what had happened in his life . . . was that he had been involved in a war with the trees . . . there were so many more of them than there were of him, and they had been swarming him for years, and they were swarming him now. He was losing — or, actually, had lost — the war with the trees.
In the second half of the book, Barber chronicles his unexpected journey toward becoming a mental health professional. After graduate school in the arts, Barber takes what he considers a temporary job working as a counselor to homeless, mentally ill men in New York City. He stays for a decade. In a series of vignettes about his clients, Barber explores several themes: how his own mental illness has enabled him to be an effective therapist, how the mental health services system sometimes fails his homeless clients, and what he sees as the rewards of a career in mental health services. I had hoped that his stories about the homeless — a population in need of an eloquent spokesman such as Barber — would be more probing than they are. Barber does not, for example, discuss the disparate perceptions of need of the homeless men and of the professionals who serve them (with the homeless often preferring concrete assistance to treatment) that can limit the effectiveness of the system. Perhaps Barber will bring us more "songs," to deepen our understanding of these issues.
Sharon Salit
United Hospital Fund
New York, NY 10118
ssalit@uhfnyc.org((American Lives Series.) )
As the book begins, 39-year-old Barber is commuting from his home in suburban New Jersey to a dingy basement office in the Bellevue Hospital Center's men's shelter in lower Manhattan, where he performs psychological assessments of new residents who come to sit in the simple black chair next to his desk. With his privileged background and Ivy League education, Barber is not supposed to be here, he tells us. Why, we wonder, is he here.
Early on, we learn that Barber is haunted by the suicide, nearly two decades before, of a childhood friend, Henry, at the age of 21. His recurring drive to unravel the mystery of Henry's despair, we learn, takes its place alongside other crippling, persistent thoughts as part of Barber's obsessive–compulsive disorder — an affliction that he has faced since childhood but managed to suppress and hide from others. By the end of his freshman year at Harvard, however, the intrusive thoughts that mark this disorder intensify and tear his world asunder. In the first half of the book, Barber describes his long struggle with obsessive–compulsive disorder and his eventual treatment and recovery.
Barber's ability to convey the experience of mental illness is striking. In one passage, he imagines Henry's final moments on the day he took his life at his family's farm in Massachusetts, in the Berkshires:
He walked over the patch of lawn in front of the farmhouse. He walked to the brown pond. Not a ripple on it. Flat. Without motion. Beyond the pond he saw the first line of naked trees, followed by more trees. . . . The trees, he thought, were like waves of soldiers, wave after wave of an oncoming army. . . . If you mowed down the first row, there'd always be another one to follow. He thought maybe what had happened in his life . . . was that he had been involved in a war with the trees . . . there were so many more of them than there were of him, and they had been swarming him for years, and they were swarming him now. He was losing — or, actually, had lost — the war with the trees.
In the second half of the book, Barber chronicles his unexpected journey toward becoming a mental health professional. After graduate school in the arts, Barber takes what he considers a temporary job working as a counselor to homeless, mentally ill men in New York City. He stays for a decade. In a series of vignettes about his clients, Barber explores several themes: how his own mental illness has enabled him to be an effective therapist, how the mental health services system sometimes fails his homeless clients, and what he sees as the rewards of a career in mental health services. I had hoped that his stories about the homeless — a population in need of an eloquent spokesman such as Barber — would be more probing than they are. Barber does not, for example, discuss the disparate perceptions of need of the homeless men and of the professionals who serve them (with the homeless often preferring concrete assistance to treatment) that can limit the effectiveness of the system. Perhaps Barber will bring us more "songs," to deepen our understanding of these issues.
Sharon Salit
United Hospital Fund
New York, NY 10118
ssalit@uhfnyc.org((American Lives Series.) )