The Outsider: A Journey Into My Father’s Struggle With Madness-Quality Guarantee

Description

An unsentimental yet profoundly moving look at one family’s experiencewith mental illness.

“A haunting, poignant story of a son’s life with, and without, his father. A rare and moving portrait of one of life’s major struggles—the devastation created by severe mental illness.” —John Oldham, M.D., Director of New York State Psychiatric Institute

In 1978, Charles Lachenmeyer was a happily married professorof sociology who lived in the New York suburbs with his wife and nine-year-old son, within a few short years, schizophrenia—a devastating mental illnesswith no known cure—would cost him everything: his sanity, his career, his family,even the roof over his learning of his father’s death in 1995, Nathanielset out to search for the truth behind his father’s haunted, solitary existence.

Rich in imagery and poignant symbolism, The Outsider is a beautifully written memoirof a father’s struggle to survive with dignity, and a son’s struggle to know thefather he lost to schizophrenia long before he finally lost him to death.

• Recipient of the Kenneth Johnson Memorial Research Library Book Award
• Winner of the 2000 Bell of Hope Award