Patrick Cockburn is a foreign correspondent who has reported from war zones in Beirut, Iraq and Afghanistan. While he is covering the fall of the Taliban from Kabul in 2002, his talented, bright and amusing elder son Henry is a first-year art student at Brighton. Who is in more danger?
The sad answer is Henry. The trees and the wind tell him to remove his clothes and swim in freezing water: fished out of the sea at Newhaven in February, he is taken to hospital and subsequently diagnosed with schizophrenia. This book is an account of the next seven years of Henry’s life, both from his father’s perspective and his own.
The result is remarkable, as important an addition to our understanding of altered mental states as William Styron’s memoir of depression, Darkness Visible, or the work of Kay Redfield Jamison, who writes about bipolar disease, or Oliver Sacks’ extraordinary navigations through the secret realms of our brains. Like these, Henry’s Demons never loses sight of the personality, the uniqueness, of the sufferer. It would be impossible not to like Henry, who is candid, touching and often funny.
‘It’s amazing the number of people who stare at you when you are not wearing shoes,’ writes Henry:
Do I have schizophrenia? My mother and father and the dreaded psychiatrist definitely believe I am schizophrenic. They have grounds for their belief, such as my being found naked and talking to trees in woods. Yet I think I just see the world differently from other people.
Unfortunately his vision of things often puts him in mortal danger. Schizophrenia can alter the body’s thermostat: Henry’s habit of taking off his clothes does not help. He is found naked in the snow in someone’s garden, suffering from frostbite and hypothermia. His feet get sore and infected from walking barefoot. He goes hungry. Sometimes he is very frightened.
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