Heavy Light

A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing

By: Horatio Clare

Narrated by: Horatio Clare

Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins

Publisher's 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.

©2021 Horatio Clare (P)2021 Penguin Audio

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)

A truly wonderful book!

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who is at all interested in mental health issues today. Beautifully written, highly informative, enormously brave and importantly pioneering. It is of potentially immense value to all whose lives are, have been or may yet be touched by what we too easily refer to as mental illness.

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.

Worth every minute

A powerful book inviting us to deeply consider what it is to be well and human. Although the book doesn’t set out to be political inevitably it is. From the fantastical journey through and to breakdown then to recovery and exploration of the systems in which this all happens, the book is a wonderfully empathic invitation to us all to ask for the sake of what do we maintain the current narratives around mental health. There are different ways forward as Horatio Clare invites us to consider. And, it is too boot, beautifully written. I will take more of this man’s work. Loved it.

Fascinating personal account of mania and psychosis

This is a really important book and I am hugely grateful to Horatio for sharing his own story with such honesty, openness and with such powerful writing.

My daughter has had four psychotic episodes in the last four years, so much of this book resonated with me and I have now recommended it to friends and family.

I sincerely hope that many mental health professionals (especially psychiatrists) read or listen to this book. I feel it would really help them understand things from the service user and family’s perspective, and it would also hopefully encourage them to reflect on the practice of modern day psychiatry - and ask themselves some questions about psychiatry’s total reliance on long term neuroleptic medication as the only answer for people with serious mental illnesses like psychosis, bipolar, schizophrenia and schizoaffective conditions.

Part 1 is a gripping account of Horatio’s hypermania - how it intensifies and builds before tipping him into psychosis, and how difficult it was for the family to get him Sectioned - all too common an experience of families with a loved one with a serious mental health condition in the UK.

Part 2 is a journalistic investigation into the mental health system in the UK. Horatio goes back and interviews some of the individuals and professionals who dealt with him during his manic episode and his Section. He then goes on to take a close look at the scientific evidence for dealing with psychosis and he interviews many people who question the standard practice of placing someone on antipsychotics for life once they have had an initial breakdown.

One fact that really stood out is that countries where antipsychotics are prescribed for shorter time periods tend to have much better long term outcomes for people with psychosis than those countries where people are placed on meds for life, The reasons for this are explained clearly in the book and that was very helpful for me to read about as we navigate the mental health system to try and support our daughter towards her own healing.

From reading this book I feel the bottom line is that there needs to be far more money put into research for serious mental illnesses (it’s nothing like the amount that is spent on cancer and other life threatening conditions) and we also need a seismic change in how psychiatry is practiced - with much more emphasis on therapy and in particular Open Dialogue, instead of just plying people with horrendous antipsychotic medication which causes weight gain, diabetes, heart attacks, permanent movement disorders and a lot more for the vast majority of people who take it.

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.

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.

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.

exquisite

Absolutely brilliant. Powerful, important, absorbing. The narration is so good that I think text readers will miss out. Thanks Horatio.

Very intetesting

Well written, interesting personal analysis of a psychiatric experience. Honest and open. Thank you.

Relatable and relevant

A lot more than I expected but glad that I took time to listen and It was worth every second .

Amazing insight and self compassion

I found this an extraordinarily accurate lived experience of the mental health crisis in the Uk. Written and read in a beautiful, gentle way with lots of vulnerability and self awareness. A must for anyone who has been through this with loved ones.