Peter Costello
Fears, Phobias and Fantasies: Understanding mental health and mental illness by Prof. Patricia Casey (Currach Books, €22.99)
This is an excellent and humane book written by a leading psychiatrist, now professor emeritus of psychiatry at University College Dublin (UCD) and active as a consultant psychiatrist. It is aimed at patients and their families, those who really need to know about the subject.
Her text is very wisely broken up into well indicated short sections easily encountered and absorbed. She explains about how mental illness and conditions have become known about over time, from the sometimes unbelievable treatment of patients in the past to the more compassionate way of today, which nevertheless is not flawless.
Moved
Yet she notes here in Ireland we have moved in a lifetime from the era of the county mental home with its locked doors and barred windows in 1945 to ‘care in the community’, which often ill serves some patients, it seems. But with better insights developing all the time, drug therapies and person to person therapies have brought about remarkable transformations.
Through the book are brief contributions from those being treated and how it feels or felt to them. These are highly-illuminating, and dramatise what might not otherwise be fully appreciated the reader.
She describes the way the psychiatric services for clients are arranged and what is available, before going on to break down the various kinds of disorders and other behaviours and psychoses in the broad definition of mental illness. These chapters are all excellent and will be found helpful by all those who encountered mental illness in one form or another, which these days is – one suspects – in very many more people that we may imagine.
Coverage
One would have liked to have seen more coverage of alcohol and the disorders this gives rise to, which remain a real difficulty in Ireland. Throughout the book Patricia Casey retains a warm and calming tone which attempts at all times to make clear what are often very complex matters confusing even to those who are well and trying to help.
This is a book to be warmly welcomed. This reviewer hopes though that when the book is reprinted, as undoubtedly it will be, that the cover will be changed. As it stands I think it is quite inappropriate to the text, emphasising as it does the lurid gothic elements of mental illness that one hoped were a thing of the past, and which run quite counter to the caring tenor of Prof. Casey’s text.
Professor Patricia Casey’s Fears, Phobias and Fantasies is available at Currach Books.