Search results for ""Author A K Benjamin""

An exhilarating journey into the unfathomable depths of the human mind, from the acclaimed author of Let Me Not Be Mad.What does it take to care for a stranger? Really care.The Case for Love is a reflection on a career treating patients with brain trauma - people whose thoughts and feelings are largely unknowable - and how and why those treatments failed.It is a reconstruction of three haunting cases in which the patients were tragically misunderstood - and an attempt through the power of the imagination to understand and make amends.It then describes the author's abandonment of his career and his tumultuous quest for healing and redemption.It is also a story of intimate relationships, pets, fatherhood and heartbreak, culminating in a moment of psychedelic transcendence and rebirth.It is about the overpowering need for connection - and how, increasingly, we are trapped in ourselves.It is a meditation on empathy and an act of atonement.It is a unique, hybrid work of clinical case study and pure invention that destroys the boundary between fact and fiction in order to bring us face-to-face with the shocking, liberating truth.__________Praise for Let Me Not Be Mad'Imagine a gonzo Oliver Sacks communing with Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose, R.D. Laing and the spirit of Kafka's 'The Country Doctor', and you still won't quite have the flavour of this wild and strikingly original book' William Fiennes'Stunning: clever, troubling, restless, honest, dishonest; one of the best portraits of madness and clinical practice I've read' Olivia Laing'A perfectly extraordinary - not to mention extraordinarily perfect - tense Hitchcockian psychodrama. I have rarely read a more haunting and enthralling account of a descent into madness. An important, profound and fascinating book' Stephen Fry'Blackly comic, warmly compassionate, a unique take on the human mind offering uncomfortable universal truths' Stewart Lee'A slow-burn belter of a book ... terrific ... so finely described, the result has the terse force of a classic short story' Roddy Doyle'Exhilarating ... dazzling ... a miraculous feat' Guardian

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Let Me Not Be Mad is an immersive, virtuosic and provocative investigation of madness, love and self-destruction that defies categorisation. 'Exhilarating ... dazzling ... a miraculous feat' Guardian'I have rarely read a more haunting and enthralling account of a descent into madness' Stephen FryA consulting room with two people in it. One of them is talking, the other is listening. Both of them need help.Throughout his life, A. K. Benjamin has found himself drawn to extreme behaviour: as a contemplative monk, an advocate for homeless addicts, a support-worker for gang members and for many years as a Clinical Neuropsychologist.His book begins as a series of clinical encounters with anonymised patients. But with each encounter, it becomes increasingly and disturbingly apparent that what we are reading is not really about the patients – it is, instead, about the author’s own fevered descent into mental illness as he confronts his traumatic past.'Stunning: clever, troubling, restless, honest, dishonest' Olivia Laing'Blackly comic, warmly compassionate, a unique take on the human mind' Stewart Lee

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