Relative Stranger – A Life After Death by Mary Loudon

Abstract

Edinburgh : Canongate , 2006 , 335pp. , £16.99 (hbk); £6.99 (pbk). This book is about Mary Loudon's search for her dead sister Catherine and a piecing together of Catherine's life. Catherine was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She cut herself off from her loving and caring family for the last eleven years of her life, and she died from cancer at the age of 47 without her family knowing. I was keen to read this book as Mary, a personal friend, had sent me a draft of the first few chapters and had spoken to me about some of her ideas for the book when I had shown her round Barrow Psychiatric Hospital, where her sister had at times been admitted. Mary is the youngest of five children; Catherine was the middle child and eldest sister, and thirteen years older than Mary. Mary does not write about her other brothers and sisters; they are respectfully kept out of it. I was hoping I might learn more about the nature of psychotic illness and its relationship to family functioning. I was initially disappointed in this hope: Mary's coverage of ‘Schizophrenia’ is in some ways classically textbook and drawn largely from a book called Schizophrenia – The Facts. It is when Mary moves away from this textbook description that the book opens right up and earns a permanent place on the bookshelf beside those other rare books that describe the experience of psychosis from the perspective of the sufferer or those close to them. There is a problem here that Mary touches on. Psychotic illness is frequently a process which insidiously renders its object incapable of sustained rational verbal communication; thus published personal accounts of madness are written by those that ‘came back’, and we know little about the experience of those who remain diminished by madness. In the chapter ‘Words and pictures’ Mary describes this deterioration in relation to Catherine's letters and artwork, which went from a childhood masterpiece (with adult attributes) painted on her bedroom door to adult primary colour drawings that looked as though they had been copied out of a book. Mary attributes this deterioration to Catherine's illness – I did wonder whether some of it might relate to the side effects of the anti-psychotic medication she took for her illness. Reading this book as a psychiatrist, a family therapist and a youngest child, I was deeply moved in all sorts of ways. A big part of me was ‘wanting to make things better’, or to suggest ways in which things might have been done differently. On the other hand something was telling me to ‘keep my mouth shut’ and listen to what Mary had to say. In fact there was a profound lesson about the nature of psychotic illness and family functioning; this was ‘less is more’. Mary writes early in the book: I never visited her because she didn't want me to. I never arrived unsolicited at her flat although many times I thought about it. When I considered heading to Bristol armed with groceries I always ended up deciding, correctly, that I had absolutely no right to do so. So I wrote. This was the approach of the whole family. Catherine moved from the family home in Oxfordshire and ended up in Bristol in a council flat where she made a life for herself, arguably a good life: she did not harm anyone and she helped some people. I believe it was the deep love of her family that enabled this to happen; they responded to her wish, not exactly to be left alone, but to stay at a distance that she felt was safe. I would like to tell you to buy this book, but I can't because it is written by a friend. What I can say is that it is well written – at times I laughed out loud; at other times I nearly cried.