Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing

Product Information

The book is in three parts, the first details his last months of extreme mental ill health and the effect it had on everyone around him. The second is about his time in hospital and his diagnosis and the third is about his experiences when he was discharged and the challenges he made to his diagnosis.

Heavy Light by Horatio Clare | Waterstones Heavy Light by Horatio Clare | Waterstones

I found the first part a bit difficult to get through. I don't think I quite got the purpose of the book at that time, or why he was telling us about his mania in so much depth. Having finished the book, I now completely understand and can appreciate why he wrote it in the way he did. It wasn't an easy read though, and, for me, personally, it dragged on occasion. I had already read Horatio Clare's book, The Light in the Dark which was about him coming to terms with a diagnosis of a kind of extreme, SAD condition known as cyclothymia and how he attempts to weather a winter in the Yorkshire Dales. He is an extraordinary writer and his nature writing, which infuses much of his travel writing and his writing about mental health is beautiful and luminous. In this book, he continues where The Light in the Dark left off, and shares his experience of a full mania which involved hallucinations, harming himself and finally being sectioned.

Clare is fearless in his analysis of himself, the effect his condition had on him personally and also those around him who loved and cared about him throughout. Although it is an account from his perspective, he does show how difficult it is for friends and family... I thought it was telling how his partner Rebecca only learns much later of some of the things he has done (about which he says very little overall). I was particularly interested in the experiences of his stepson, and his stepson's father...contrasting perhaps with the simpler experience of his six year old son. He doesn't quite talk of the 'positives' or things about himself which might be attractive but I wondered about his partner's acquisition of a husky puppy (a puppy! a husky!) whilst he is in hospital and they seem destined to cement their separation, and later their cosy evening routine involving a glass of red wine.... but she is adamant that there is no negotiation on him continuing to take medication. Another gem read during 2020/ 21 - what an amazing read by one of the most eloquent authors I have encountered. This book starts of my the first few chapters describing the inside of Horatio’s head when he’s in the throes of madness. It that way, it was very chaotic and surprising. The next part described his time on the ward and the last bit was a mixture of his personal recovery and treatment plan as well as a dive into the current systems and thinking in mental health care today. So this book was both personal and factually informative. It certainly gave me new ideas and perspectives on mental well-being. And the author’s stake in his own care gave this book a personal touch.

Heavy Light by Horatio Clare | Book review | The TLS Heavy Light by Horatio Clare | Book review | The TLS

Like 2018’s In a Poem Unlimited, Heavy Light is a sideways look at the history of pop music and the capitalist world in which it thrives. What’s different here is how it sounds, and how it feels. These songs capture the watershed moment when your throat closes up, your head cools off, and your tears run dry: It is when you enter what can only be described as a zone of weightless grief. It’s dense, heady, hard to grasp, but that’s what makes her music so rich. Remy casts herself as a pop star and reflects on the traumas of childhood and earth through parables and the music we grew up on. To details in the depth he has detailed of his own personal experiences of the highs and lows of bipolar is something unique. But to then go on to detail his own journey of healing and recovery and to then question why it is not more widely available for others is inspirational. Partly a tribute to those who looked after Horatio, from family and friends to strangers and professionals, and partly an investigation into how we understand and treat acute crises of mental health, Heavy Light 's beauty, power and compassion illuminate a fundamental part of human experience. It asks urgent questions about mental health that affect each and every one of us.I thought that most of this book was astounding. I have never read a more enthralling and completely terrifying account of psychotic delusions. What is almost harder to bear, clearly for him, is the impact on his wife and family. His account of his treatment by psychiatrists is highly critical, while much more praise is given to others in mental health services and especially the police. He is also interesting how his class and education help him elude services which probably wouldn’t happen for others. Two thirds of the way though he finds a psychiatrist who gives house room to Clare’s ideas on treatment and says ‘At last I was being listened to’. I understand the frustration but the others listened too, they just didn’t agree. The last third is least good, with some journalism on austerity which I agree with but is quite light weight and Open Dialogue, which seems to be the solution, but is barely mentioned. Mental illness is deeply complex and contested and it is too much to ask that he can provide the answers. Whereupon it appears medication (or was it something else?) pretty much immediately removes all the delusions (other, arguably, than that he is perfectly fine) During the later section of the book where he rightly questions many of our models and practices, he doesn't seem to reflect at all on this occurrence. Nor on his repeated assertion that he knows the triggers for his illness and 'just' needs to avoid them... but doesn't (and, I suspect, will not, consistently, for reasons it might have been interesting to explore) This is, soberingly, not his first memoir of emotional distress, dysfunction and mental ill health, nor, arguably, even his second. After a lifetime of ups and downs, Horatio Clare was committed to hospital under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act. There really is a bravery in writing about a total breakdown of the senses and mental processes that make us who we are in our lived experience. It is such an unusual ordeal for most of us to comprehend, that shifting of reality and otherness of existing.