Now that I’ve finished writing my own book, I’ve got time to catch up on what I haven’t been reading. The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness, by Lori Schiller and Amanda Bennett, wasn’t on my “must read” list because I had heard that Schiller credits her recovery largely to clozapine, and that didn’t set well with my understanding of what a “good” recovery should be attributed to. (I’ve become less hardline on recoveries since then.) So, looking for a good read, I purchased the book on Kindle.

As an aside, just about all my reviews gets four or five stars for the simple reason that the memoirs come highly recommended by other readers. I don’t finish books that I don’t enjoy.

So, five stars for The Quiet Room. The story is rather unique because it’s not only from the author’s perspective, but also from the candid perspective of each of her parents, her brothers, her psychiatrist. What I find interesting about this 1994 book is that it was published in a decade that saw the biomedical model of mental illness take off. There was talk in the book along the lines of “getting the chemistry right,” “finding the right drug and drug combinations” and how the newer antipsychotics were changing the treatment landscape. Lori Schiller  Continue reading “The Quiet Room”