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Heavy Light
- A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing
- Narrated by: Horatio Clare
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
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Heavy Light
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Summary
Brought to you by Penguin.
Heavy Light is the story of a breakdown: a journey through mania, psychosis and treatment in a psychiatric hospital and onwards to release, recovery and healing.
After a lifetime of ups and downs, Horatio Clare was committed to hospital under section two of the Mental Health Act.
From hypomania in the Alps, to a complete breakdown and a locked ward in Wakefield, this is a gripping account of how the mind loses touch with reality, how we fall apart and how we can be healed - or not - by treatment. A story of the wonder and intensity of the manic experience, as well as its peril and strangeness, it is shot through with the love, kindness, humour and care of those who deal with someone who becomes dangerously ill.
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.
A book to look out for in 2021 in the Observer.
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Critic reviews
"An extraordinary book: deeply moving, darkly funny and hugely powerful." (Robert Macfarlane)
"One of the most brilliant travel writers of our day takes us us now to that most challenging country, severe mental illness; and does so with such wit, warmth and humanity, that, better acquainted with its terrors, we may better face our own." (Reverend Richard Coles)
"A record of the bravest, most perilous, most intrepid journey that any human being can ever make. It is stricken, moving, urgent, crucial.... A luminous, beautiful achievement." (Niall Griffiths)
What listeners say about Heavy Light
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- C H Titley
- 10-04-21
Impeccable story and delivery
The subject of the book was topical and in a journalistic manner highlighted the strange and terrible route the British psychiatric establishment has chosen to pursue. The rigid and simplistic approach to mental problems based on little knowledge has been known in the very public decline of Peter Green, Syd Barrett and Brian Wilson. Their friends were left to salvage some life for them from the strangely prescriptive and destructive chemical regime imposed on them by the official medical powers. Since the release of the book It seems the government here have adopted a new line with the announcement that long term medication for chronic illness should no longer be relied upon. Perhaps the apparent determination of pharmaceutical corporations to create a climate of addiction may be stifled. Kafkaesque in style delivered with impeccable enunciation and grammar appropriate for an English rather than American accent the book makes its point sharply with a compelling tale.
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- c
- 21-08-21
exquisite
Absolutely brilliant. Powerful, important, absorbing. The narration is so good that I think text readers will miss out. Thanks Horatio.
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- Cubester
- 11-10-21
Intense and rewarding
A powerful, personal memoir which shifts from lunatic delusion, through haphazard healthcare experiences and out into an impassioned call for a more nuanced and human-led approach to nurturing those who err from accepted codes of ‘normality’. If you’ve had any encounters with the mental health system or struggles with mental wellbeing, there’s a great deal to treasure here. Vaulting, poignant descriptions of nature, sequences of excruciatingly honest detail, and the author’s polished rosewood intonation combine to create a deeply rewarding experience.
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- Emma PT
- 02-04-21
Fascinating and engaging
Amazing insights into mania and from a lay person’s perspective a fascinating as insight into the treatment of mental illness which seems to need the change that is slowly taking place.
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- Dom Bromley
- 19-07-23
If only I’d read/heard this, this time last year
Having heard Horatio Clare’s Radio4 series asking if Psychiatry is working, and having experienced a life changing event involving mental health last year, I was drawn to this book and found it incredible helpful and insightful. A must read/listen for anyone who “suffers with their mental health” or has a loved one who does.
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- A Paramedic
- 18-05-21
Outstanding
For anyone with an interest in mental health, this is a wonderfully clear account of a decent into illness and rise to recovery. For anyone else it is a human story of love and strength.
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- a m orland
- 19-09-21
Brilliant and inspiring
Challenging at times to listen to, this is an honest and fascinating account of a descent into mental illness and subsequent recovery, showing that recovery is both possible and achievable with the right conditions.... which includes going against our institutional norms of medication and medicalisation and instead listening to our own selves as humans and being treated in that way as a human in distress. Well written and nicely narrated, Horatio Clare became a familiar and trusted voice and is very much worth listening to. Some fascinating detail and statistics from our mental health system past and present too.
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- Waggy From Derby
- 24-05-21
a Bible for "bi-polar"
which should be read by all those in the mental health business, doctors, carers, family of "mentally ill", definitely by those who have power over the NHS,. It is exercise and talking that will get most through the worst, thank God I have a dog.
very informative, very entertaining, I just hope it changes the way we treat the mentally ill.
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- Aquilina Christophorus
- 15-10-21
A man in balance
Clare describes a spectacular shift in narrative which holistic healing has always promoted but society bound by economic forces refuses to see. A much needed account of the type of changes in social attitude that will help rather than poison our mentally disordered. The book shows these patients to be largely those who dare to struggle (i e. the ones displaying rather than repressing the hardships of birthing the soul) and we should benefit from their struggle to understand a better more human less pharmaceutical way forward together. Let's stop excluding brilliant souls for their troubled minds, social polarisation and alienation causes them to have in the first place.
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- Oliver
- 10-04-21
Brilliant
Horatio has such an brilliant way of interweaving story with facts and opinion to give a book that’s gripping and revelatory. He handles the subject of mental health or perhaps just ‘well-being’ with frankness and sensitivity.
Highly recommend!
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