Absolutely the best autobiography I’ve read on mental health

Anna’s amazing writing and honesty in this book incredibly resonated with me and my family members in regards to mental illness.
Her wit and skill will have you enthralled!
Again thank you Anna for writing this book!!!!

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Magical!

The true magic of this book is not in the words and phrases (although they’re pretty damn good) but in the essence of Anna that brought them to life. And, of course, the narration by Anna could not be anything but perfect. It will stay with me for a long time.

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A memorial memoir

Anna weaves a personal story of mental illness in such a way that you think you a talking to a friend really well written!

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A masterpiece

Anna Spargo-Ryan is smart, funny, fun and kind. Her razor sharp wit is as much a part of her as her skin, and how much of a friend she is to all of us traversing the laneways of mental illness. This is a triumphant book about the nuances of memory, trauma and hope - Spargo-Ryan is the victor in this book: buoyed with love and a desire to live.

My sentences are all running together because I have too many thoughts and it’s not possible to articulate them properly. I feel protected and held, having spent time in this life held in this phenomenal book. I am so very glad Anna wrote this, and it is a shining light of privilege to have been able to hear her read it to me.

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Raw look at mental health

I absolutely loved this book. As someone who lives with ASD/ADHD there were so many times I was just screaming “Yes! This!” when listening while driving to work. I wish I could get everyone who’s close to me to read this.

Also as a health professional, it was both saddening but not surprising the barriers spoken about for receiving the right help. Between the narrators own personal struggle to seek it “Am I even sick enough”; to the socio-economic barriers that come with even getting a diagnosis; to the fundamental misunderstanding of mental illness by a lot of health professionals - this is something I think all health professionals need to read. I often find myself trying to advocate for clients in letters to their GP but feel it falls on deaf ears.

Thank-you.

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A kind of magic

One person’s ability to deal with life’s setbacks does not equal another’s. When Anna Spargo Ryan describes a comment she swears her father made as he drove her as a sixteen year old to a party, ‘If you keep on behaving like this, no one will like you,’ is the type of throw away parental line that can derail a young sensitive person and to me it’s this type of experience that when it’s simply the tip of the ice berg can add to the load of so called mental ill health.
 
Anna Spargo Ryan has a wonderful way of weaving the stuff of her lived experience, her amusing way of putting a slant on her childhood and adolescent angst and adding a dimension that to her mind equals mental ill ease to the point she wants to apply medical labels that give it form but seems not to factor in the effects of the drugs she took in adolescence and her early twenties.

The way recreational drugs can unhinge a fragile mind. At least not in the beginning of the book. Later she recognises a connection. Not everyone who takes recreational drugs will suffer psychosis, but I reckon take enough of the especially the stronger varieties, often enough and in large enough quantities and your mind will be affected.
 
If not to the point of psychosis and so-called madness, then at least, or at worst, a type of emotional deadening. As someone said to me many years ago when I was observing the people who inhabited the then psychiatric hospital Heatherton, there’s nothing sadder than a burned-out schizophrenic.

A person who has grappled with psychosis much of their life, has endured countless repertoires of experimental drugs, and whose body no longer fights the madness of the medical interventions to control it. They live lives of hollow despair and rarely achieve much beyond survival. In and out of institutions all their lives, such people in years gone by, obvious on the street if they even ventured out by their tardive dyskinesia.
 
I wanted to know what all the Spargo Ryan hype was about. And now I know. She has packaged the struggles of people whose lives are unhinged through an inability to cope with life’s struggles in neat packages that make sense at a certain sense and yet frustrate me for their simplicity and for the way she tends to generalise from her own experience of what she calls psychosis to that of other people so affected. 

Even as she rails at the way medicos tend to corner people into stereotypical and simplistic labels based on recognisable symptoms rather than go into the narrative complexity of each person’s unique struggle.
 
We know so little about psychosis. Spargo Ryan would do well to read the likes of Darian Leader What is madness to get a better grasp on the nature of psychosis, and the way it has meaning.

Our psychological symptoms have meaning. They’re not just random concoctions that pop up from nowhere, of course they can be made trickier with the introduction of so-called recreational drugs or legitimate medication which alters brain chemicals in ways again we can only begin to guess at.
 
Our brains, like our bodies have universal shared features and yet every single person is unique and no two people will ever be exactly the same even identical twins. But we all have interior lives that are most often obscured from others, and often times even from ourselves.
 
Spargo Ryan reckons the first questions a psychologist will ask when you visit for the first time, as if it’s an absolute truism, is how you’re sleeping and eating. I doubt this, though I recognise there are some who might go through the traditional psychiatric list of questions so facile and simplistic and designed to determine whether a person is caring for themselves and whether they’re in their ‘right ‘mind.

As a therapist, I never ask such questions, certainly not the first time I meet a person. It strikes me she’s yet to form a deep and long-lasting meaningful relationship with a therapist who can help her overcome some of her struggles. At least not in the beginning, but by the end of the book she has met a therapist who is helpful. And any therapeutic connection is only as good as the two people involved.
 
Spargo Ryan writes with the authority of personal experience, which is powerful but does not make her an expert. Fair enough she writes from her own experience, with a dash of research thrown in. But research is tricky. It depends on where you look. A Kind of Magic is memoir, but sold as a treatise on mental health.
 
This bothers me. Spargo Ryan’s version of psychosis seems tame compared to the psychoses I’ve encountered and her thoughts about personality disorders might be on the money but they’re horrible labels to attach to any person, including her.

She seems not to know about the aversion the medical and helping professions have long held towards the so-called borderline personality disorders and I’m going back to before she was born.
 
None of these labels come from positions of compassion. They all tend towards the reductive. And yet it seems there are folks who seek a label. That’s it then. That’s what ails me.
 
Maybe it’s linked to the medicalisation of states of mind. I cannot abide the way the word ‘mental’ gets bandied around. States of mind enter into different fashions. When I think back to my childhood, conformity was the order of the day. And the way to be, was to conform. Perhaps in the aftermath of the Second World War and ensuing Cold War, the nuclear threats and ongoing fears of a third world war, when most people wanted peace and prosperity. Nowadays there’s cache attached to the idea of being neuro-atypical. As if the different label is attached to creative geniuses.
 
Spargo Ryan writes evocatively and her lyrical words flow. She flits from one anecdote to the next and finds poetic ways to describe her symptoms, the way her mind has long tricked her into thinking in particular ways. Emotional dysregulation is her order of the day and although no one has given her the label of narcissistic personality disorder, which she claims she’s not been given, there is something self-seeking about her story, and the way she presents herself. Which is okay. Aren’t we all self-seeking? Don’t we all do things that are in our own interests or its opposite, the self-destructive stuff of self-loathing and trauma.
 
As ever I must examine my own conscience. Do I find myself baulking at Spargo Ryan’s writing because she has an audience, a vast audience of admirers while I do not. Am I simply envious of her success? Why does her writing get under my skin this way. Has done for a long time ever since I read her award-winning essay that impressed me for its eloquence about being mad. Beautifully written.
 
She certainly can write, but a spokesperson for all people who struggle with life’s psychological disorders, especially on the edge of psychosis, I think not.
 
Yet by the end of the book, it’s helpful to read about her encounter with the GP who provides a Mental Heath Plan who questions her progress. At least by the end of the book Spargo Ryan recognises there is no cure for her state of mind, only a way of managing that is more helpful than in the past. Her therapy keeps her alive, gets her out of bed in the morning. That has to be worth something.

Elisabeth Hanscombe

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Magic Level Unlocked

Anna has a voice she can use all days of the week. This book is really, really important. It's truth, it's "uncut joy" (my new favourite term) and it's a dissection of a flawed mental health system and how it's still possible to live. One of Anna's key messages is that it is okay to not have a cure, to always be in therapy of one sort or another. This book is a proper blessing, we are so lucky Anna is here.

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Powerful and breathtaking

Relatable in some experiences but so far in others. relisting to end to capture

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Stunningly powerful

As someone halfway through a masters of counselling, Anna’s book should be on the curriculum. Her succinct, thoughtful writing describes the human experience of mental health challenges beautifully.

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