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Aug
24
Sunday Salon Book Review: Stalking Irish Madness by Patrick Tracey
2008 at 12pm Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
It’s been kind of a blah reading week for this book lady. I only reviewed one book–The Sex Lives of Cannibals–and it felt like it took me forever to finish it. I did have some fun blog posts, though. Have you seen my Deserted Island Reading List? What would you take with you for a long trip to a desolate place? On Wednesday I dished about my guilty pleasure summer TV shows and posted a few photos from my library wedding, and Thursday I shared favorite library memories and a few more photos. Yesterday, I borrowed the Book Brahmins questionnaire from Shelf Awareness and had a little getting-to-know-me moment.
Last night I finished Stalking Irish Madness for Library Thing Early Reviewers. Here’s my review.
Available for purchase August 26, 2008.
I received this book from Library Thing Early Reviewers.
On a crisp autumn day in 1924, Patrick Tracey’s great-great-grandmother May Sweeney (who was 29 years old at the time) left her home in County Roscommon, Ireland dressed in her finest clothing and jewelry. When she wasn’t home by dusk, her husband Jack began to worry. It wasn’t like May to stay out so late in a potentially dangerous part of town. Jack knew that May had been changing; once cheerful and lively, she had become increasingly aloof and melancholy, but he didn’t expect this:
At last Jack sees May’s figure approaching in the murky darkness. In her white-gloved finery, she moves up the walkway. But something is amiss: she is clutching her shoes; her hat is cocked, her makeup smudged. May stands in the middle of the road, her shoeless feet swollen and reddened, hard-worn, it would seem, from hours of walking. She says nothing, but as Jack goes out the gate to meet her, her slow grin says it all: every tooth has been wrenched from May’s head–her gums a swollen and bloody mess.
May reveals to Jack that she has been hearing voices who told her that they would leave her alone if she would remove them from her dental cavities. Of course, the voices lied. They continued to plague May, who suffered from schizophrenia for the rest of her life and is the first in a long line of the author’s family members to fall victim to this
apolocalyptic form of madness [that] robs its of our most precious human gift: the ability to separate the real world from the unreal and to trust one’s thoughts as true.
The schizophrenia in Tracey’s family is passed down his mother’s side, and its appearance is unpredictable and often skips a generation. The victims include Tracey’s great-great-grandmother, his grandmother, one of his uncles, and two of his four sisters. Counting himself as “a genetic near miss,” Tracey sets out for Ireland on a quest to uncover the history of the madness that has plagued his family for four generations. It has the potential to be an amazing journey, but Tracey doesn’t find much.
Though the beginning of the book and Tracey’s descriptions of his family’s history with schizophrenia are compelling—-his firsthand accounts of watching the illness overtake his sisters are particularly gripping—-the rest of the book falls flat. In fact, the middle two-thirds of Stalking Irish Madness read much more like a travelogue than a research project or case history. Tracey provides increasingly extraneous details about the weather, the countryside, and the colorful folks he meets at the local pubs (not to mention a few self-indulgent passages about his own struggles with substance abuse), and this book lady had the sense that he was doing so in order to fill the pages, to have something to talk about since his inquiries about schizophrenia and local history were continually fruitless.
In his travels, Tracey does meet and interview a few schizophrenia researchers, and the information they provide is both interesting and frustrating, due to the fact that what little we know about the disease has made us only more aware of how much we don’t know. In general, Tracey’s descriptions and explanations of schizophrenia are thoughtful, well-written, and accurate, which makes this a good book for those readers interested in a very general introduction to schizophrenia. Tracey’s exploration of the links between socioeconomic problems and mental illness are also interesting and worthwhile, but, on the whole, the book leaves much to be desired.
I was very interested in the premise of this book and thought it had (and still has) the potential to be a very interesting story. However, I was very frustrated by the fact that it really isn’t a book about Tracey exploring his family history; it’s a book about Tracey trying to explore his family history, not having much luck, and so paying much more attention to the scenery and local color than he should have. At only 257 pages, the book is a relatively short, but it could have (and should have) been much shorter.
If nothing else, this could have been a great book for introducing lay people to a better understanding of mental illness. Tracey could have focused on the research he did and the academics and doctors he interviewed, and it would have been very interesting and informative. As I read, I realized that the book, as it is written, would actually have worked much better as a documentary film. We could follow Tracey on his quest, see the sights for ourselves, share his frustration in finding few answers, and come to our own conclusions. As a book that was supposed to be about tracing family history, though, it just doesn’t work. Tracey does not do what he says he is going to do; there is very little family history within this book that is ostensibly focused primarily on uncovering such secrets.
That said, Tracey’s writing isn’t half bad, and he does a decent job of exploring the potential causes and correlates of schizophrenia. He asks why, in a family plagued by the illness, some people develop the disease while others don’t, and he resists the very appealing temptation to wallow in self-pity for what his family has lost. I didn’t love Stalking Irish Madness, but I didn’t hate it, either. It would be a good introduction to schizophrenia for anyone interested in very basic information, and I’m sure it would be an interesting read for other people whose families have experienced similar plagues of madness or disease. I’m giving it 3 out of 5.
UPDATE: Click here to listen to an NPR interview with author Patrick Tracey.
It’s a shame this book wasn’t better executed – it sounds like it had great potential.
[...] a very blah reading week (Rebecca is not the only one)—I didn’t even read on the plane yesterday!—I kind of reconnected with The [...]
[...] Go to the author’s original blog: Sunday Salon Book Review: Stalking Irish Madness by Patrick Tracey [...]
This afternoon I heard the tail-end of the NPR interview with the author, and found eight pages of the book on an internet site. The first time I’d read of mental illness in connection with Ireland was in “Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland”, a study by anthropologist Nancy Shepper-Hughes. “Saints, Scholars . . .” is interesting and the concept of a country afflicted with a high rate of mental illness even more so, particularly in light of what can be learned re: genetic inheritance. Patrick Tracey identified the victims as from maternal line of his family. Fascinating.
[...] started this week with a review of Stalking Irish Madness, Patrick Tracey’s travelogue-family history story of attemping to [...]
“Stalking Irish Madness” is a unique and remarkable book. I imagine having roots in Ireland and mental illness in one’s family contributes a good bit to my take on Tracey’s book.
This book is being earmly embraced by Irish-Americans most of whom have at least one family member living with an agonizing mental illness.
I’ve had the good fortune to do an audio interview with Tracey and to initiate a friendship. His humility, detailed knowledge of his subject, courageous honesty, and willingness to integrate science, myth, Irish history and culture, etc.
I found this one to be quite refreshing. It’s not for readers lacking an ability to appreciate a non-linear and ‘unorthodox’ way of story telling.
I’m not sure how any honest attempt to cover this topic can be dismissed as “blah, blah, blah”—but I have Irish eyes and come from a family with far more mental illness than Patrick’s family; his family hails from County Roscommon–mine is from County Kerry.
Thanks for sharing your opinion, Dr. Keough. I agree that this is an important topic that deserves exploration and continuing research, and I very much appreciate non-linear and unorthodox writing styles when they are done well and serve to tell the story the author sets out to tell. I did find Tracey’s book interesting, but it was much more about his journey than about what he actually uncovered.
Is it okay for the author to chime in to clear up a couple some glaring misconceptions? I’d like to respond to the reviewers claim that I uncovered nothing of interest in Ireland.
First of all, my family may be the “most schizophrenic” family ever fully documented and the discovery of the first gene link in County Roscommon–home of my schizophrenic sisters–is in itself mighty remarkable.
Secondly, I can’t prove it, but the downstream generational effects of famine and older fathers and substance abuse — and their link to schizophrenia — are scientific fact. I may not be able to connect my two schizophrenic sisters to the Great Irish Famine that belched our ancestors out of Ireland, but that is only because correlation is not causation. I certainly think it’s a worthy discussion and so does the scientific community.
It’s maddening to me because this Book Lady review stands out as the only poor review I’ve received so far. Every other critics has loved or liked it, yet why is it that the one poor review from an attention deficit blogger pops up first first on the Google search? It’s upsetting because the Book Lady full acknowledges that she started and then stopped reading Stalking Irish Madness when another book she’d been longing to read appeared in her mail box. Unfair. No wonder she lost the plot. It sounds like she skimmed it because it’s the sort of book that skips over a lot of information as the travelogue progresses.
In going to Ireland I “confirmed” rather than “uncovered” some startling relevant and not otherwise widely known facts. First, that famine triples rates of schizophrenia in offspring. (Children malnourished in the womb of mothers who carry them through a famine are nearly three times as likely to develop the disorder.) Is this not remarkable?
Second, that older fathers also triple rates of schizophrenia in offspring. (Starting at puberty, male sperm cells divide every sixteen days. By the time we’re, say, 50, there’s much greater number of mutations cause by so-called copy errors as our cells replicate. In peasant Ireland, men did not usually become eligible to marry a parish girl until they hit 40 or 50 or 60 and inherited the tiny potato patch, and then it was only the oldest father who spread his mutated sperm).
I do not think this is widely known. Nor is it much discussed that Irish rates of madness spiked in the 19th century. This alone is an astonishing fact long buried in the ash heap of history. My book connects the dots by stating the obvious: With benefit of modern science, we can now see why they were driven mad: famine, older fathers, and, to a lesser extent, drink.
Alcohol abuse is the smaller third leg of my three-legged stool theory of Irish madness, but the risk of offspring developing the disorder rise by only one-third — not nearly the tripling of rates that correlate with both famine and older fathers.
Just think 20 years ago they were still blaming Irish madness on sexual repression. (See Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics.) Not long before that it was the fairies who were blamed, as the Irish were said to be away with the fairies. Now we know that both views are absurdly wide of the mark.
The Irish may be sexually repressed, but that’s got balls all to do with schizophrenia, which is now widely regarded as a biological disturbance in the brain. The pro-environmental, anti-heredity bias is now a thing of the past. So much so that the classic work of anthropology on the Irish insanity, Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics, by Nancy Scheper Hughes is based on theories as bogus as the fairies themselves.
As I my quest concludes, the fairies were framed. It was the famine, the older fathers, and to a lesser extent the drink that were responsible for redlining rates of insanity among the Irish. Is this not remarkable? And isn’t it also logical to conclude that it was the suffering and the misery caused by the British who ruled Ireland so cruelly in that century that they would go on to inspire even Adolf Hitler in the next?
Granted, the memoir/travelogue is more about my journey of discovery, my inner landscape as a sibling of two schizophrenics, a nephew of one schizophrenic, a grandson of one schizophrenic and it all goes back to County Roscommon where the very first gene link was found. is this not remarkable?
Admittedly, much of the science is simply footnoted for those who wish to learn more. For instance, the Dutch Winter Hunger studies are a treasure trove, but why mention them in a memoir that’s written more from the heart than from the head?
Science tends to bore readers to tears, so it’s often best dealt with quickly and left in footnotes for those scholarly types who want to learn more. Otherwise, mine would be like so many other books about schizophrenia that never get read, and then we’d only remain as woefully ignorant as we are now about great groups like the Hearing Voices Network, which are at the first barricades of the coming revolution in psychiatry. Is the great service done by the Hearing Voices Network not remarkable?
I think it’s also more than a little noteworthy that the Irish had an outbreak of insanity as they were squeezed off their land. Who knows about this story that I’ve resurrected from 160 years ago? I never heard of it myself until I looked into it. Not surprising. To the victors belong the history and the English wrote most of it. So the history of Irish lunacy gets buried.
What drives my narrative is my own personal need to know why this all has to be. My quest is conducted as a sort of due diligence on what we do know about this mysterious disorder. Especially after one perfectly normal family member after the next goes mad, it’s my duty to tell the next generation what little we know about a major psychological disorder that gets draped in the dark corners and not discussed. Ask yourself this: when’s the last time you ever heard of a 5K Run for Schizophrenia? Yet there are some 3 million schizophrenics in America alone. It’s all so truly remarkable.
Finally — and with all due respect to the Book Lady — she herself flatly admits (in a previous review) to wholly abandoning Stalking Irish Madness for a longstanding favorite author whose latest novel came in over the transom. I can’t blame her for that – it’s only human nature — but it’s obvious why she lost the thread.
For instance, when Book Lady complains that she wanted to know what happened to May Sweeney White, my schizophrenic grandmother who had all her teeth yanked out to try to silence the voices in her head, I can only say: read chapter two, the one you probably skipped after going away with the fairies to that other book you’d been waiting for.
I state quite clearly what happened to May Sweeney White. She goes schizophrenic and has all of her teeth extracted after her sixth child is born, and then goes to live in a mental asylum for three decades. She is visited there on Saturdays by my mother and sisters (two of whom will have the same schizophrenic fate 20 years later), and then she dies of cancer in her late 50s while still in the asylum. She never recovers from schizophrenia, but then again, few ever do. That’s pretty much all there was to tell, and it was told in the second chapter.
Book Lady at least acknowledges that she can’t fault nonfiction for being true to life. That’s for sure, what with all the fake memoirs out of late. And mine is not your typically solipsistic family memoir. It’s written as much as a spiritual quest for answers where there are none, sadly, for this illness that has no known cause, just correlation (again, famine, older fathers, substance abuse, emigration).
The book is not one that clubs the reader over the head with facts, encyclopedia-style. Instead it unfolds with a pointillist melancholy befitting the Irish and the topic. In the end, it concludes that to forgive something first may be necessary to understand it truly. Even if your own family is the most schizophrenic one in documented history, forgiveness of schizophrenia itself is needed.
We tend to think that we must always walk away with a rock solid understanding of something before we can forgive it. Perhaps it’s the other way around.
Patrick Tracey
Author
Stalking Irish Madness: Searching for the Roots of My Family’s Schizophrenia.
Mr. Tracey,
Authors are always welcome to join us for discussion. I appreciate your response, but I do want to make a few corrections.
1) I am hardly an “attention deficit reader.” I did finish your book (as is noted near the top of this post), and I read (and finish) 3-5 books per week.
2) My review pops up first on google most likely because of the high level of traffic my site gets, which is probably due to the fact that I’ve developed a reputation as an honest and critical reader who writes in-depth reviews and has built up a large readership.
3) I never said that you didn’t uncover anything of note. In fact, I acknowledge in my review that the history of your family is quite compelling. I did, however, feel that the contents of the book–which is admittedly a travelogue–didn’t live up to the promise made by the title and jacket descriptions—you did search for the roots of your family’s illness, but given the Irish people’s reluctance to offer up much information, you didn’t find much. I think this would have made an interesting article, but there seemed to be a lot of “filler” in the book.
4) I have a master’s in clinical psychology and can certainly appreciate the importance of understanding the origins of schizophrenia. I think a little more science in the text would have been interesting–true readers are not so easily bored as you might assume.
5) I acknowledge in my review that you make interesting and important connections between socioeconomic conditions and the development of mental illness
6) I’ve re-read this review several times now and do not at any point lament about wanting to know what happened to May–I did read your book (thoroughly, at that) and resent your assumption that the fact that I didn’t love it means I must have been swept away by the faeries.
7) I believe in increasing awareness about schizophrenia and mental illness in general, and I acknowledge in my review that this book could be a good introduction for lay people who are unfamiliar with the causes, origins, and symptoms of the disease. If you’d like to start a 5K for schizophrenia, I’ll strap on my Nikes and join the cause.
9) Whether I like a book or not, I make a point to write a balanced and well-measured critique. In my review of your book, I point out several things I enjoyed or appreciated (are you sure you actually read the whole review?), and I provide reasons to explain why I didn’t love it. No one enjoys writing a negative review, but I attempt to do so without being snarky or disrespectful. That’s more than I can say for your remarks here.
p.s. Not everyone is going to love your book. That’s just part of being a writer. Don’t take it so personally next time.
Fair enough, Book Lady. Not everyone loves every book, and not everyone loves every review. Sorry if the Book Lady’s views were taken “personally.” I did no mean to be snarky or disrespectful but guess I crossed the line because my family memoir is deeply personal. Thanks for the forum. I’ll get out of your way here and try to grow thicker skin. – PT
[...] in the minority because most reviews I’ve read have been overwhelmingly positive. (Click here to read [...]
Re Stalking Irish Madness ; Searching for the Roots of My Family’s Schizophrenia by Patrick Tracey.
I loved this personal story of Patrick’s family how ever unfortunate it is.As a matter of fact I could not put the book down until I read it cover to cover…
Re Book Lady’s statement that she would have prefered a little more science in the subject is utter nonsense.Although she is a clinical psychologist she should understand that the writer does not have a medical background .However, he has his own life experiences and that of his sisters.Telling this story has taken great courge.
Did the Book Lady read the reviews on the back cover of Patrick’s book?Getting a review from none other than Dr. E Fuller Torrey the world’s foremost expert and author on the subject of Schizophrenia and now rave reviews in The Washington Post is certainly evidence that this book is a big winner.Congratulations to Patrick and his family
Flo Foley
Flo–We’re all entitled to our opinions. I’m glad you enjoyed the book, and I certainly hope the best for Mr. Tracey. I generally don’t pay much attention to the reviews on the back covers of books, as publishers solicit those, and you can find rave reviews on the back covers of even the worst books. (Please note that I don’t think Mr. Tracey’s book falls into that category).
I did find the story of Mr. Tracey’s family to be interesting and compelling, and I’ve even noted here that I am in the minority when it comes to not loving this book.
The beauty of the blogosphere is that it allows all of us to share our ideas and opinions, and I welcome that here, but please, let’s be nice and refrain from calling each other’s ideas “utter nonsense.” I wouldn’t do that to my readers (or to any of the blogs I read), and I ask for the same here.
Holy cats Rebecca, look what you started. lol If everybody else loved the book, even Torey Hayden (I’ve read a dozen of her books and like her very much), why would any writer get his shorts in a twist about one blogger’s ‘it wasn’t as good as it might have been’ review? Somebody is either prevaricating about it’s status among other reviewers or they haven’t been involved in writing and publishing long enough to know that a review is an opinion; one person’s opinion and that’s all it ever is. You handled yourself well. I’d have ignored the lot of them. Responding to any review that isn’t actually stating inaccuracies is unprofessional on the part of a writer. I’m always embarrassed for a writer when he or she does it.
I salute the Rebecca-the-Book-Lady for providing the forum. Her take on Stalking Irish Madness was pretty good, even if it was the toughest review I’ve faced so far. As Book Lady herself was kind enough to remind me, 3 out of 5 stars ain’t bad. I was wrong to get my knickers in a twist. Book Lady was right. I reckon the right and proper thing to say here is thanks, Book Lady, for the “teachable moment.”
I may have over-reacted, but sorry to say to Sandra, who just weighed in, that I am not feeling “embarrassed,” as you suggest I should. If there’s one truth I’ve come to know in this world, it’s that mental health means not stifling emotions out of fear of “embarrassment” or, worse, being labeled as one who should be made to feel “embarrassed.” You don’t have to be a sibling, parent or child of a schizophrenic to grasp this key concept, but it helps enormously.
If one is ever “embarrassed” then the key emotion is guilt. Families of schizophrenics confront feelings of “guilt” at the utter helplessness of watching their nearest and dearest vanish before their eyes. Unless and until we accept our powerlessness along with our loss — in a word, forgive ourselves and forgive the world — then the guilt again will rear itself. So “embarrassment” doesn’t even begin to get it. Try writing a family memoir about your deepest pain — it’s like running through the town square stark naked.
The only way for me to come to terms with all the madness in my family was to forgive it at its widest and deepest. For me this meant finding forgiveness for myself, my family, my schizophrenic ancestry, for the small people of the world (forgive me) who judge schizophrenia so harshly, and for schizophrenia itself. Why? Because I do believe, as a sort of psycho-spiritual truism, that you can never truly understand something until you forgive it. All my life I’ve had it backwards. I’ve tried to understand schizophrenia–and all sad things in this sad world–first, and then forgive them. It’s a completely counter intuitive to forgive and then understand, but for me it’s the only way and so that’s how my story gets written as I venture back to Ireland looking for answers and, ultimately, the essential peace of mind that only forgiveness can ever bestow.
I’ll step off again. If people want to travel through Ireland with an ornery bachelor in camper van as he comes to forgive and ultimately understand schizophrenia, then they’ll read Stalking Irish Madness. If not, then who cares? There’s bigger things to fret about than the bruised ego of memoirist coming to terms with his sisters’ insanity. I may have one of the most schizophrenic families ever documented — and it may stretch back 160 years — but this too is not forever. As Yeats wrote, “What they undertook to do, they brought to pass. All things hang like a drop of dew upon a blade of grass.”
Patrick Tracey
Stalking Irish Madness was named one of the best books of 2008 by Slate magazine. 27 books were selected out of thousands.
Thanks for pointing that out, Tina. It looks like that list was formed by allowing each editor to select a favorite book of the year, which is an interesting way to do it. Congrats to Mr. Tracey on this recognition.
I’m chuffed to learn that Stalking Irish Madness will receive a 2009 Ken Book award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) on May 14 for making “an outstanding literary contribution to the understanding of mental illness.”
I mention it only to point out that, unlike the “one of the best books of 2008″ distinction from Slate, a list that was indeed formed by letting each editor make a pick, as you point out, the Ken Book award selection was made by a vote of the entire board. I’m told the vote was “unanimous.”
It’s bound to happen every now and then that I end up in the minority in my reaction to a book. I’m happy to hear that you’re receiving recognition for your book.
Irish Madness also got a New England PEN award
Thanks for acknowledging that. My 2009 PEN New England Nonfiction Prize–along with the top award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness-should help get the word out that there is hope for schizophrenics, even if this one review missed the essential position of my story.
As detailed in Chapter 16 (The Pearl of Galway) of Stalking Irish Madness, the ground is now shifting beneath psychiatry’s feet. Apparently this chapter was easy to overlook. Why? I have no idea. Here I devote a whole chapter to the great work of the Hearing Voices Network. Maybe I should have devoted the entire book to their work, but then it would have been a much denser narrative and, I suspect, few would bother to read the book.
This hearing-voices movement represents nothing less than a revolution within mental health. I dare say that when the history of mental health in this century is written, it will be seen as singling a shift from flat-world to round-world thinking within psychiatry itself.
In Chapter 16, I describe in detail a group of schizophrenics in Galway who have found a way to recovery from the psychosis of auditory hallucination–and visual and tactile hallucination too, once they have first learned to identify and manage the auditory hallucinations, and this after they’ve first learned the skills necessary to manage the dominant of their auditory hallucinations.
At one time it was thought that encouraging schizophrenics to “dialogue” with their voices, as this technique is sometimes known, was akin to advising them to drink the fruit of the poison tree. Now it is seen as absolutely necessary for the mental well being of millions of schizophrenics worldwide.
In Europe, this new attitude of open-mindedness has not been missed. In Europe, this new willingness to take the symptom of auditory hallucinations seriously has flourished. In Europe, schizophrenics are now leading normal lives because they’ve acquired the skill set necessary to cope with the experience of auditory hallucination a day at a time. In Europe, the scoffing is stopping. They are round worlders and we, I can assure, remain the flat worlders here.
For the suffering family members who have been told for lifetimes that there’s nothing we could do for our schizophrenics, this shift is massive. It means the auditory hallucinations are not “nothing.” It means that we no longer live on the sharp end of “nothing can be done.”
The movement that has been slow to root itself in America. As a result in our so-called progressive modern era it remains all too easy to keep schizophrenics draped in the dark corners of society.
The change is slow because we find it very hard to wrap our own heads around the irrefutable fact that auditory hallucinations are real. Now, however, the psychiatrist have been led to the truth through scans that show the region of the brain that lights up when we listen to sound also lights up for schizophrenics when they have no outside stimuli present. Think about the implications of that statement for a moment and you’ll begin to understand that the flat world is over. It’s a concept alien to us, which explains why my Chapter 16 is too easy to ignore, overlook or dismiss.
I reckon your rebuke smarted not because it was the only unfavorable one for me. At every turn we family members of the 2.4 million American schizophrenics have been told to stuff it basically, because there was nothing that could be expected to be done for people who hear voices. Now we know different. Now we know that this quiet revolution is making giant strides, not just in Ireland and Holland but throughout Europe.
How did you miss the big takeway? Did you skip Chapter 16? The fact that you acknowledged leaving my book–for another favorite author who came in over your transom–told me you weren’t paying attention from the get-go. I come from the one-day-at-a-time and the one-book-at-a-time school and believe a book should be read uninterrupted if it’s to get a fair shake, especially a book of this nature.
I only hope that my PEN prize will amplify the message that there is much, much help on offer. The situation is not as dire as once thought. Not by a long chalk. There is help out there if only we pay attention to the symptom set described by schizophrenics themselves at last. If we take the time to listen, there’s much for us to learn from the least of our brethren.