Songs from the Black Chair: A Memoir of Mental Interiors (American Lives)
Barber's intimate knowledge of mental disorder comes from inside and out, and both perspectives are haunted by the suicide of his friend, Henry, at age 21. Inside is the story of Barber's childhood phobias and incipient obsessive compulsive disorder. Outside is the knowledge gleaned from his work with the homeless mentally ill in New York City, by day in the largest mental health shelter in the world, by night in his office at Bellevue Hospital. Barber, currently an associate of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health, isn't afraid of words like "crazy" or "madness"; he'd rather render his "clients" as human characters than as case studies. Because he loves "the stories, the improbable and voluminous and twisted narratives that pour out of the men within minutes of their taking a seat in the black chair," he relates them with detailed vitality and with respect for the tellers. As his obsessive compulsiveness becomes a pathology, Barber evokes in this compelling and artfully crafted book a sort of cinematic tension; that he survived to tell the tale (with therapy and Prozac) doesn't lessen its punch. As in first-person mysteries, Barber is alive and, though not unscathed, balanced at book's end.(Mar.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.