Jim Read

When a painter struggles to sell his work, with his career waning, he chooses to paint nudes. Jim Read's THE MOLLYBUSH NUDE grasps at ideas we all ask ourselves: how did life get this way? Bill Burnon, a sixty-three-year-old landscape painter, and Marion Barkley, a fifty-nine-year-old diner owner are separated by six hundred kilometres of highway. Nevertheless, they are as close as the wind on a spider's web. Bill and Marion have loved each other passionately since they were seventeen and thirteen, but only in a limited measure: always a summer, a modest stretch of some months, shorter or longer depending on their unfailing ability to irritate the heck out of each other. When Bill's gallery managers suggests painting nudes to give his career a much-needed boost, he goes with it. He plans to paint a series of nudes. Deeply, Bill wants to paint Marion, but when he approaches her about the notion, she rebuffs him -- her rejection forces him to find another model. Turmoil and jelaousy haunt their love when Bill selects Libby for his paintings. She's younger. She's mysterious. She's troubled. A friendship develops between Bill and Libby as Bill wrestles with his new artistic endeavour. What happens next, nobody in Mollybush could've expected.

Over 60 million psychiatric drugs are prescribed in England every year. This lively and provocative overview provides the most complete examination to date of the lived experience of taking psychiatric drugs. The book examines the consequences of long-term psychiatric drug use from the perspectives of people who have taken them and tried coming off them. It draws out the tensions between patients and professionals about medication and offers examples of how to resolve these constructively. Based on extensive UK research, this book includes exploration of: - Current practice in the use of psychiatric drugs - The varied experiences of people who take them - The debate over effectiveness - What service users perceive as both good and bad practice by health professionals - The different experiences of people from black and minority ethnic communities Timely and topical as well as clear and accessible, this book is essential reading for students, educators, practitioners and service users in the fields of psychiatry, mental health, social work and counselling.

This is an exciting collection of writings by people who have experienced mental distress. It includes accounts of psychiatric treatment, psychotherapy and alternative treatments; life in mental institutions and moves into the community; self-help methods and work to improve mental health services. Moving, sometimes funny and often dramatic, the pieces are written by some of the key activists in the mental health survivors' movement, as well as by people best known as writers and poets and others who, for a period of time, have been caught up with mental distress and have something original to say.