Cressida Connolly

A world of talking trees

Patrick Cockburn is a foreign correspondent who has reported from war zones in Beirut, Iraq and Afghanistan.

issue 19 February 2011

Patrick Cockburn is a foreign correspondent who has reported from war zones in Beirut, Iraq and Afghanistan. While he is covering the fall of the Taliban from Kabul in 2002, his talented, bright and amusing elder son Henry is a first-year art student at Brighton. Who is in more danger?

The sad answer is Henry. The trees and the wind tell him to remove his clothes and swim in freezing water: fished out of the sea at Newhaven in February, he is taken to hospital and subsequently diagnosed with schizophrenia. This book is an account of the next seven years of Henry’s life, both from his father’s perspective and his own.

The result is remarkable, as important an addition to our understanding of altered mental states as William Styron’s memoir of depression, Darkness Visible, or the work of Kay Redfield Jamison, who writes about bipolar disease, or Oliver Sacks’ extraordinary navigations through the secret realms of our brains.

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