The Outsider: A Journey Into My Father's Struggle With Madness

by Nathaniel Lachenmeyer

Book Overview

An unsentimental yet profoundly moving look at one family's experience with mental illness.

"A haunting, poignant story of a son's life with, and without, his father. A rare and moving portrait of one of life's major struggles--the devastation created by severe mental illness." --John Oldham, M.D., Director of New York State Psychiatric Institute

In 1978, Charles Lachenmeyer was a happily married professor of sociology...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0767901916
• ISBN13: 9780767901918
• Release Date: August 2001
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.1" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

A Book Everyone Should Read

I truly believe this book should be read by everyone, not just people that are going into the mental health field. I was required to ready it for a Social Work class I am currently taking at the undergraduate level; however, I can say without a doubt it is by far the best book I have ever read! Lachenmeyer really brings home the stigma and heartache that is experienced by people and their loved ones suffering from such a debilitating mental illness. Most people are unaware of the devastating effects mental illness can have on a person and their family. This book highlights so many issues concerning mental health as to responsibilities of people in the system, stigma, prejudice, and the tolerance of society in general to someone suffering from mental illness. Moreover, this book was really an awakening that this could happen to anyone at any time. I wish everyone could read this book as it really teaches a lesson on humanity!!

New to Schizophrenia

Nathanial Lachenmeyer's book was an amazing read. Having a rather new but strong interest in schizophrenia as well as hearing the interview on FreshAir compelled me to buy this book. It opened many new doors for me as far as understanding the disease more. My step-father's brother has the disease. I've always wanted to have at least a small understanding of his behaviour. Thank God I was able to get a hold of this book. Not only does it tell the sad story of a man spinning downward (yet still holding his head high no matter how adverse his environment becomes) but it gives the reader a great understanding of the disease and statistics surrounding it as well. I still cannot get over how he was near death by starvation yet they held his SSI money. And it has to be mentioned when Charles Lachenmeyer was asked if he thought he were mentally ill, he stated that his mental illness was "love of life and humanity". Truly amazing!

A Wonderful Book

Why aren't there more books like this? I heard about it on Fresh Air and have been surprised it hasn't been more widely reviewed. Does the Ny Times Book Review or the Washington Post or Newsweek or Time just not care about mental illness or Lachenmeyer's compelling story?Anyway, I feel as if I have been searching for books like this my whole life. Both my mother and my sister suffer from schizophrenia and I have felt lost and alone. So many books seem to make fun of the illness, or to not really get it. By it I mean what it is like for the families of those who suffer.Though this book is a wonderful first step, my own wish is personal. I wish for a book that really tells what it is like for family members who try to deal with a schizophrenic family member day in and day out. Lachenmeyer's book is a reconstruction. Lachenmeyer wa estranged from his father and journeys back to "find" his father posthumously. It's close, and compelling, but it doesn't adequately capture an experience that many of us must endure: daily care of a severly ailing family member. That said, this is a marvelous book and a tremendous first step to opening up a discussion of mental illness in this country.

An unsentimental journey

A son's attempt to come to understand the schizophrenic illness that struck his father when the son was a small boy. He had had little contact with him after that, but he came to know in later times his father's story, the downward spiral caused by his illness. What comes through, too, is the dignity with which his father attempted to cling to his humanity, even though he was tortured by a convoluted paranoid delusional system. Eventually the people in a Vermont town were able help him, ironically, by getting him convicted for panhandling, a move that got him off the streets, where his weight, at a height of 6'4", was 140 pounds, and where he was suffering frostbite during a bitter winter, and into a mental hospital where he was given medication that improved his condition and undoubtedly saved his life. The author writes about the pros and cons, then, of our society having criminalized mental illness; in this case the father's life was saved after he'd been arrested for a petty crime, determined to be not guilty by reason of insanity, and sent to a mental hospital where he got the care he needed. A riveting book.

A Mind at Work

At a time when far too many memoirs either wallow in psychobabble and sentimentality, or retreat to a smug and shallow irony, Nathaniel Lachenmeyer's The Outsider proves a welcome exception. Thoughtful and heartfelt, this book shows what is possible when one focuses one's intelligence on a subject that is both personal yet outside oneself. Lachenmeyer attempts to understand his father. Does he succeed? In many ways, yes. Does he learn something of himself? Certainly. But more importantly, as he takes an unflinching look at his father's schizophrenia, as he chronicles his father's delusions, Lachenmeyer is able to honor him. He offers a study of madness that is remarkable in its lucidity.