Journal Facts

Journal
Auto/Biography
ISSN
0967-5507
Volume
14
Issue
1

Article Facts

Title
Diaries, Self-talk, and Psychosis: Writing as a Place to Live
DOI
10.1191/0967550706ab030oa
Author
Brendan Stone (University of Sheffield, UK, b.stone at shef.ac.uk)
Pages
41-58

Article Links

Diaries, Self-talk, and Psychosis: Writing as a Place to Live

Brendan Stone (University of Sheffield, UK, b.stone at shef.ac.uk)

DOI: 10.1191/0967550706ab030oa

Abstract

In this paper I consider the therapeutic consequences that writing, and in particular, the writing of a diary, may effect for those subject to the intense distress of psychosis. I have taken my lead from two sentences at the close of a journal kept by a woman hospitalized with an acute psychotic disorder. Subsequently published as Phone at nine just to say you're alive, this text records the trajectory of Linda Hart's year-long illness. Writing on the day before she returns to work, Hart (1997: 352—53) makes the following bold assertion concerning the efficacy of keeping a diary: `Writing this journal has kept me on the edge of sanity. Without it, I believe I would have tipped over into the chasm of madness from where I could not be reached.' With reference to Phone at nine, and also to another hospital diary published as These are my sisters, in which Lara Jefferson makes similar claims to Hart's, I consider here whether writing can really ameliorate the devastation of psychosis. My central contention is that the process of writing is beneficial because it is able to attenuate the malformation of identity characteristic of so much acute mental illness.

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