I know that some Schizophrenics connect with music lyrics or movies, but does anyone have any books that were really important to them when they were ill? I had the Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hess. I felt like I was in it. Can anyone else relate?
T.
I had my journals,over 10 years worth, sometimes 10 pages a day written out.
Then I find my ex had shared too many pages with anyone who asked, and amyone he thought would benefit from reading them.
Worst part was, I fond he scanned pages into ms word, rewrote many pages to sanitise them for his benefit, then retuned new pages to appear I wrote them.
Had to shred quite a few after reading the useless crap.
I was probably in the beginning stages of my strange days when I read The Glass Bead Game and I could really relate to it. It was about the personal effects of intellectual overkill it seems to me.
Another was Alan Wattsā The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Both of those were healthier understandings than my dabbling in R.D. Laing and Castenada.
Those are four that come to mind.
Herman Hesse is great, I love Siddhartha. Demian was really good too.
I read the Harry Potter books when I was put in the psych ward for the first time as a teenager.
I became obsessed with anything from the Beat writers,WIliam Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Iāve read some of these books over and overā¦ I think they were just so āout thereā, bizarre, sick, twisted, that reading them made me feel less crazy, I could relate to so much of it, and it made me feel less alone in my screwed up mind. My particular favourites are Burroughsā novels, especially Naked Lunch, and Ginsbergās poetry, thereās one called Howl, Part 3 (Iām with you in Rockland) is one of my favourites pieces of poetry. And a line by Kerouac from On the Road that I loveā¦
āā¦the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.ā
Read 1984 for the first time right after I was released from the hospital. Blew my mind. It is my favorite book now. Also read āone mans wildernessā while I was in the hospital. It also blew my mind at the time lol made me want to live in the Alaskan wilderness
The King James bible, I like it more than the newer translations, especially the first 5 books that make up the Torah.
a wrinkle in time
I read this when I was in the most severe mental state in the hospital.
Orwellās 1984 was an important book for me.