cover image Private Terror/Public Life: Psychosis and the Politics of Community

Private Terror/Public Life: Psychosis and the Politics of Community

James M. Glass. HarperCollins Publishers, $37.5 (253pp) ISBN 978-0-8014-2300-0

David, a mental patient, believes himself to be a particle zooming through the skies to war; Ruth's present reality on the ward is Auschwitz, 1943; Julia uses razor blades as tools of self-mutilation, also as teddy bears. The first-person narratives of these severely disturbed people--all patients at Sheppard-Pratt hospital in Towson, Md.--distill terror, anguish, loneliness. But even as delusions erode their human connections, these individuals, according to Glass, reveal an irrepressible drive for community and relations built on trust. In a remarkable, hope-giving study, Glass ( Delusion ), professor at the University of Maryland, examines the ``political self'' that survives in patients classified as beyond help as he visits a Vermont residential treatment center, Israeli kibbutzim and Geel, a Belgian town which attempts to integrate the chronically mentally ill into the community. (Sept.)