Review: 'The Ghost Garden: Inside the lives of schizophrenia's feared and forgotten' by Susan Doherty
Pub. Date: 5/14/2019
Publisher: Penguin Random House Canada
A rare work of narrative non-fiction that illuminates a world most of us try not to see: the daily lives of the severely mentally ill, who are medicated, marginalized, locked away and shunned.
Susan Doherty's groundbreaking book brings us a population of lost souls, ill-served by society, feared, shunted from locked wards to rooming houses to the streets to jail and back again. For the past ten years, some of the people who cycle in and out of the severely ill wards of the Douglas Institute in Montreal, have found 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 full cooperation, she brings us their stories, which challenge the ways we think about people with mental illness on every page. The spine of the book is the life of Caroline Evans (not her real name), a woman in her early sixties whom Susan has known since she was a bright and sunny school girl. Caroline had formed a close friendship with Susan and shared stories from her life; through her, we experience what living with schizophrenia over time is really like. She has been through it all, including the way the justice system treats the severely mentally ill: at one point, she believed that she could save her roommate from the devil by pouring boiling water into her ear...
Susan interleaves Caroline's story with vignettes about her other friends, human stories that reveal their hopes, their circumstances, their personalities, their humanity. She's found that if she can hang in through the first ten to fifteen minutes of every coffee date with someone in the grip of psychosis, then true communication results. Their "madness" is not otherworldly: instead it tells us something about how they're surviving their lives and what they've been through. The Ghost Garden is not only touching, but carries a cargo of compassion and empathy.
Schizophrenia is a complex disease, one which affects people across all kinds of social boundaries, one which may be genetic in nature but may also be caused by environment. It is an affliction that has become a slur, something thrown around, something associated with bad things happening. As with many of these things, the truth is that those afflicted often suffer the most. The rate of schizophrenics who become violent is small, the damage the disease does, however, is extensive. While the world of those who are schizophrenic falls apart, so those the world of those around them. The Ghost Garden is very thorough in the way it tracks the fallout of schizophrenia, the way it affects parents, children, and friends, and how it puts a strain on relationships of all kinds. The book is also very explicit in its call for more resources, which is does not necessarily through an active call-out but by highlighting the life-saving work some hospitals, doctors, and charities perform in the lives of the people it discusses. With its detail and unflinching look, The Ghost Garden gives a voice to a group of people who are marginalised and overlooked and for that it is important in and of itself. While not everything in the book worked for me, or perhaps resonated with me as intended, I nonetheless found it a very enlightening read which will inform me moving forward.
The Ghost Garden centers on the story of Caroline Evans (Doherty changed all the names, except those of medical professionals for the sake of privacy). We meet her first at what can be described her lowest point, before jumping back in time to her childhood. One of ten children, Caroline seems like your average teenage girl but because we know what is coming each oddity turns into a warning sign. Thanks to extensive conversations with Caroline herself and her siblings, Doherty is able to sketch an incredibly detailed portrait of Caroline's life and I couldn't help but get wrapped up in it. Due to the depth of detail, I at times almost felt overwhelmed, which may have been Doherty's intention. A life with schizophrenia is a life of constant underlying tension and dread. I couldn't help but feel for Caroline and her siblings and was immensely impressed at their willingness to share to the extent they did. Caroline's story is interjected with short vignettes of other people suffering from schizophrenia, one way or another, who Doherty has met during her time volunteering. These vignettes frequently functioned to highlight, underline, or even contrast to what was happening to Caroline and I felt that this back and forth was very well done. A part of me did wish to meet more people, to hear more of these smaller stories to understand the breadth of experiences people have with schizophrenia.
One aspect of The Ghost Garden I felt a little uncomfortable with was the intense focus upon the physicality of the people Doherty was meeting. While I do understand it is important to point out how a person's appearance impacts the way they are received by society, I couldn't help but feel that there was an almost implicit judgement in these descriptions as well. Something along the lines of 'These people suffer so much that they can't help but smoke and overeat and smell'. I fully believe that this is not how Doherty intended these descriptions to come across, but the sheer accumulation of them, which included frequent references to faded clothing, cheap food, dyed hair, and body odour, hit a sour note for me. It is made clear that much of this is down to medication and a lack of assistance, and it is important to face that and not let the extremity of certain situations overwhelm the instinct to help, but I nonetheless question whether this was the best way to express it. I do have to admit I don't necessarily know a better way.
Another thing worth noting about The Ghost Garden, as I mentioned all the way at the top, is that this is a deeply personal and subjective book. Susan Doherty is writing from her own experiences, detailing her own emotions, and trusting to the memory of those around her. The major benefit of this is that you get to see how deeply these people affect her and how much love and kindness they have to share. The whole stigma around people with schizophrenia being "insane", or any other pejorative, falls away once you see them through Doherty's eyes. A downside is that The Ghost Garden strays into being an argument against medicating patients. And I do understand this after having read the book and the experiences described therein, but I nonetheless feel it could be risky. I don't think medicating people to the gills and hoping they'll stay still long enough to not cause damage is the answer, absolutely not. I do also think that some medications have very intense side-effects which need to be considered. But, I also think that schizophrenia is too complex to dismiss medicine as an option. In a perfect world we would have all the money and resources to give each person that suffers the time and support and talk therapy etc. which they need, alongside the right balance of medication which helps them but does not disable them. Unfortunately that perfect world is not here yet and schizophrenia's complex nature makes it difficult to pinpoint a cure or even a cause.
I give this book...
3 Universes!
The Ghost Garden is an intriguing, but most importantly empathetic and gentle, portrait of those suffering from schizophrenia, both directly and indirectly. Doherty's kindness shines through in her writing and has definitely helped me inform my own thinking. While this a subjective book, in the sense that Doherty speaks from her personal experience rather than a professional position with medical knowledge, there is nonetheless a lot of insight to glean.
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