The Cairn

The Snow Globe Journals Reviews

Mental Health Today, 2010
Review by Lara Lea Wilson

The Snow Globe Journals
Suzy Johnston, The Cairn 2009, ISBN 9789854809225 92pp £10

If you want to find out what being seriously mentally ill feels like, then this short book by Suzy Johnston is for you. It offers an honest account of being overwhelmed by mental distress. The author looks backs at the time she lived with severe psychosis and describes her chaotic and frightening world. The short chapters are used to paint a picture of despair and loss. While such a vivid account might threaten to overwhelm, Suzy weaves two important messages of hope through the book: Life is worth living, and, things don’t remain awful forever.

Divided into three sections, the writing moves through the chaos of illness to the experience of being in hospital, with short pieces on what matters inside a psychiatric unit – smoking, therapy, medication and time and boredom. She comments on hospital reviews (ward rounds) and asks the inevitable question – shouldn’t someone have invented a better system by now? In the section ‘The Journey Home she looks at what helps to build recovery, what helps when things start to become unsteady and how she lives with her illness. Her ideas provide a template for someone seeking recovery but perhaps it’s a little disappointing that doesn’t give us more detail about how she found her way towards particular coping strategies.

The Snow Globe is a very quick read and gives and effective description of the chaor and fear experienced in breakdown. For this reason it’s worth reading. It has a strong message of hope that no matter now bad it seems, this is not how it will stay. If you want an insight into what it feels like being in a psychiatric ward, this is worth a read.

Publishser’s footnote – We would advise reading The Naked Bird Watcher first as it provides more coping strategies for recovery before reading The Snow Globe Journals .

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Firstly the honesty and openness is admirable and it is a very easy and compelling book to read and certainly leaves an impression.

I liked how there was a sense of everything, when you’re ill, being permeated by the issues connected with that, for example when you get flowers in hospital in can’t-cut-yourself-plastic vase. I also found that part quite funny, made me laugh although I’m not too sure everyone would find it funny, but with my own experiences I found it so! I would imagine it is interesting and insightful to those without these experiences to realise that even quite banal things like flowers in a vase have to be thought out carefully.

I love how there are scattered quotes/lyrics throughout, as it works really well

I LOVED how very clearly it is illustrated how any delusions / hallucinations ARE REAL to you. I have a friend who sees a girl, this girl has been with her for life and she can be very nasty and distressing at times. My friend knows she isn’t real, as do we, her friends, but the thing people often don’t get with things like that, and voices etc, is that it IS real to the person perceiving them. Perception is reality and that’s all there is to it. I thought that part was really strong.

The shortness of the chapters I liked as the experience of reading it was quite jumpy and wide-reaching – in a short book you manage to talk about many aspects of your life and of you, whilst retaining some sort of sense of how psychosis can be ‘jumpy’ too if you see what I mean? You’ve covered a lot of ground in a short space.

Last thing which I think is really important in a book like yours is how you managed to portray the isolation of having experienced psychosis and hospitalisation. And the call against stigma was great, especially how you chose the medical profession particularly.

Katherine Taylor
Research Associate
Spectrum Centre for Mental Health Research
Lancaster University
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/shm/spectrum/

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The Snow Globe Journals read like a blog. Really. It is a collection of thoughts, musings, rants and debates on mental illness, both the rational arguments around stigma and irrational experiences of psychosis are talked about. The thoughts are linked through the experience of a single person and that’s all really. There is little reference between thoughts. There is a slight continuity. But really urgency reigns. It feels, not exactly slapped down on the page but that the thoughts came fully formed and anxious to be written.
The book is notably darker than her previous (The Naked Bird Watcher) and it is perhaps that this one is rougher, has less corners buffed away. It is closer to the bone. It is the mental illness I experience. Kay R Jamison is a marvellous writer but An Unquiet Mind was smoothed out, less jagged emotions to prick me with. SGJ feels, in that most cliched of ways, like someone has written my thoughts. Though at the same time they are divorced from me. Similar but not the same.
It is though absolute normality that Suzy brings in her books that captivates me. There is a detailing of an average day in SGJ which mentions thinking about suicide. Well not suicide but killing yourself.

There is something in the way that Suzy writes that is utterly and completely affirming to me. That all these screwy thoughts are just screwy thoughts. We all think screwy stuff. My screwy stuff has been shaped and moulded by the symptoms of my illness.
Maybe I have taken the wrong message from what she wrote, maybe I took exactly the right one.
Bipolar Disorder Community 2010

‘The Snow Globe Journals’ ISBN 9780954809225 is available from book shops, internet book sites or from this website. Price £8 (includes packaging and postage)


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