[Apologies for posting these reviews from a computer that can't open Amazon. I'll come back and insert the links when I can.]
A Fair Trade Book
Title: Stalking Irish Madness
Author: Patrick Tracey
Author's website:
stalkingirishmadness.com
Publisher: Bantam
Date: 2008
ISBN: 978-0-553-80525-3
Length: 257 pages of narrative, 6 pages
of references, 9 pages of index
Quote: “The notion that madness had
favored the Irish had been kicking around since the 1850s... between
1817 and 1961, no other nation had produced, in proportion to its
population, so many... conditions we now call manic depression and
schizophrenia.”
According to his research, Patrick
Tracey reports, full-blown schizophrenia is shaped by a combination
of up to sixteen genes. Even in his family, in which that combination
runs, few people really get that disease—which Tracey describes in
vivid terms that leave no room for confusion with ordinary mood
swings, or even with “manic depression” (now more often called
“bipolar disorder”), which is relatively common and treatable.
Neither schizophrenia nor bipolar
mental illness is particularly Irish, although genetic gluten
intolerance is, and gluten intolerance has been documented both to
aggravate and to accelerate the progress of mental illness. Most
celiacs are not schizophrenic, but in one group of schizophrenics
studied, one-third were celiacs. Being an Irish-American celiac, I
was eager to read this book, after seeing it reviewed on Associated
Content; I was disappointed that Tracey does not discuss whether his
schizophrenic relatives have gluten intolerance or any other food
sensitivities.
“Genetically speaking,” Tracey
says, “the Irish are no more at risk than any other people. But in
their darkest hour” (during the nineteenth century potato famine)
“their rates of insanity were pushed to extremes.” Starvation
obviously produced extreme physical stress, accentuating any mental
illness to which people were genetically prone, and producing
emotional “breakdowns” in people without genetic predispositions
to mental illness.
What was uniquely Irish about the
schizophrenia that runs in families like Tracey's is the colorful
folklore that only the Irish mind could spin around it. These people
attributed the effects of gluten intolerance to “hungry ghosts”
that attached themselves to patients and devoured the nutrition in
the food the patients ate. Likewise, schizophrenia was attributed to
the Faeries, who took fancies to mortals and, when they carried off
those mortals to be their consorts or slaves, left things that looked
like humans but weren't to take their place; schizophrenic, autistic,
or even deaf-mute people were suspected of being these
not-quite-human “changelings.” Or, according to an alternative
story, the families that were prone to schizophrenia were descendants
of people who had offended a particularly powerful wizard.
You might think people would have been
more interested in curing a disease than in inventing explanations
for it, and although no real cure for schizophrenia has ever been
found, the taletellers did try.
There were said to be wells whose water might relieve mental
illness, if a person was lucky. St. Dymphna was said to intercede on
behalf of the afflicted, although she obviously lacked the power to
cure full-blown schizophrenia, for which patients are now treated
(though not really cured) at hospitals dedicated to the more powerful
Sts. Brigid and Patrick (and at hospitals not officially dedicated to
any saint). There were also said to be places where people might “see
the Faeries”; seeing them was usually considered likely to cause
schizophrenia (and may have been a symptom of it) but some people
hoped the Faeries could be persuaded to reverse the exchange of human
and “changeling.”
Tracey begins his narrative with a
pilgrimage to one of the caves (or graves—in Old Irish the same
word meant both, probably because the same places were both)
associated with schizophrenia, then backtracks to describe the
symptoms of his relatives' peculiar form of insanity. Schizophrenia
is not to be confused with the ordinary symptoms of mood disorders or
brain damage. If it could be confused with anything, it might be
confused with a drug reaction.
There are, Tracey
mentions near the beginning and again near the end of the book,
people who've been diagnosed as schizophrenic who “manage their
illness.” It's not perfectly clear whether these people really have
the same disease that caused Tracey's grandmother to demand that a
dentist extract all of her teeth at once, or caused one of his
sisters to attack a family friend with a knife. Hallucinations can be
induced by less serious damage, often to specific nerves, than
schizophrenia does. It is possible that some people who seem to be
“managing” schizophrenia are actually living with milder
neurological dysfunctions.
Tracey's interest
in Ireland is not too sentimental to include a keen interest in the
country's economy—starvation was, after all, the big trigger for
“Irish madness.” “It's not my ancestors' Ireland,” he
reports, “with construction cranes everywhere...Tara Hill...is
having a four-lane toll road built through its valley...The
Irish...are parking their money abroad, positioning themselves even
as...absentee landlords...[P]roperty speculation has been called the
new pornography.” There are “more single than married adults,
many more new cars bringing ever more road deaths, and
people...killing themselves in record numbers.” “The Irish seem
so alert—so switched on--” and yet, “Punching the radio
buttons, we land on...an ad for a group that calls itself
Schizophrenia Ireland...offering a hotline number...I flick the
station and the Gnarls Barkley summer chart topper, “Crazy,” is
on the air. For a moment, I wonder if I'm going mad.”
But economic
prosperity can do only so much. Ireland was a small inbred island
nation for a long time, and nurtured several less than functional
genes along with its rich culture. Tracey meets a stuttering
hunchback, “the incredible human tortoise,” who reminds him of
the nineteenth-century stereotype of “the Irish lunatic,”
although the old man seems sane. This old man, and other people in
Ireland, seem to Tracey to fit “the contradictory image of the
Irish as friendly and hostile, cheery and angry, happy and
melancholic.”
“Melancholic”
originally described an intensely emotional personality, not a
depressive one, as our e-friend TIM LAHAYE has done so much to remind
American Protestants; if you are, or know, a creative “melancholic”
Highly Sensory-Perceptive person, “friendly and hostile, cheery and
angry, happy and melancholic” makes sense. The HSP trait is not
especially Irish but Irish lore and literature celebrate it more than
the lore and literature of some other cultures. Tracey, apparently
not HSP or related to HSPs, disappoints me further by not discussing
the current status of the HSP trait in Ireland, although in a way
this may be good for HSPs, highlighting the absence of any link
between HSP and schizophrenia. (Some HSPs are bipolar, though, and
others are mislabelled as bipolar.)
Tracey contrasts
the booming (or bubbling) economy of modern Ireland with the economic
misery his ancestors left. “Crops rotted, rents fell behind...a
million Irish died of starvation, typhus, cholera and dysentery...The
Irish didn't starve for lack of potatoes, they starved for lack of
food generally, and there was plenty of that taken out by British
guards and sold off to the rest of Europe.”
He's looking for
relatives and for memories of his ancestors, but since his Irish
ancestors died before anyone now alive was born, he doesn't find
much. “You're not the first Yank to come looking for relations,”
one person living near the site an ancestor left tells him. “You'll
have to tell me their first name, and then you'll have to tell me
what business you're going there on.” Professional storytellers
used to earn their living on the streets, so Tracey imagines one
“leaning toward the hearth and telling me a tale of our lunatic
ancestors,” but “It didn't turn out that way, exactly.” What's
available by now are old lists of names, and even when he knows an
ancestor's given name he can't be sure which of two or three people
listed by that name in an old record book might have been his
ancestor.
He researches what
might have become of ancestors who were schizophrenic. Although the
disease, which always develops early in life and often pops out
without warning, appears to be uncomfortable enough for patients,
“treatment” for schizophrenia has generally appeared to be even more uncomfortable. Prior to the eighteenth century, schizophrenics might be put in
jail, “confined for weeks without benefit of exercise” until
“some lost the use of their atrophied limbs.” Before that,
“sometimes the family lunatic was kept in a four-or-five-foot hole
dug underneath the floorboards, or, worse, in the pit in the
outhouse. The pit was kept shallow so he could not stand erect,
making him easier to control.” While Michel Foucault had suggested
that the incidence of “confinement” of Irish paupers to asylums
might have been inflated to suppress protests, Tracey finds evidence
that the asylums were comparatively comfortable places, where
patients were at least provided with beds and oatmeal, and an asylum
inspector reminded his subordinates not to waste beds or food on
“pauper cases of harmless idiocy” but to reserve them for the
violently insane.
He visits the Glen
a Galt, where water from a local stream was said to cure insanity,
and learns that there just might have been something in the story:
“Some persons...got it analyzed, and they said there was a very
high content of lithium in the soil.” Lithium is commonly used to
relieve bipolar mood swings today. Tracey feels somewhat relieved by
this discovery (“I feel my drum beats in time with the Irish now”),
even though his schizophrenic relatives are beyond hope of cure by
lithium.
He also contacts a
“Hearing Voices Network,” where he's told that “as many as 10
percent of the population has at some time perceived sensory input
when no stimulus was present.” (A few years ago, a discussion on
Live Journal showed that this might be partly due to confusion about
the difference between thinking-in-words, as opposed to
thinking-in-pictures, and hallucinating “sensory input” that
seems to come from outside the individual's mind.) For most people,
of course, “hearing voices” is still an occasional experience
“and those voices tend to be less disturbing.” True schizophrenic
hallucinations are “cacophonous, discordant,” and hard to filter
out of consciousness...raising the question, once again, whether
those who stop taking drugs and “accommodate” or “accept” the
voices (and other hallucinations) are those who really have
different, more mild disorders. However, one patient “devotes time
each day to sitting relaxed and listening to his voices,”
apparently preventing sensory overload that causes the voices to
“play tricks, knocking down perceptual expectations, plunging him
into the dimension-swirling zone.” This wholistic treatment seems
unlikely to work for Tracey's schizophrenic relatives, but it offers
hope for less severely afflicted people.
Before leaving
Ireland, Tracey finally finds a distant cousin who admits that one of
her nine siblings was also schizophrenic. About all he's able to tell
us about his schizophrenic distant relatives is that finding them
puts a sense of closure on his journey and his book. He does not go
into detail about the complex of genes suspected to be involved in
schizophrenia; perhaps, at this stage of DNA research, it's better
that way. He leaves Ireland with what seems to be more of a sense of
indignation about the abuses the entire country has suffered, in the
past, than any information about the prevention or cure of “real,”
disabling schizophrenia.
Although he's
chosen a topic that's inherently not fun to read or think about,
Tracey is a skilled writer, and Stalking Irish Madness is more
pleasant to read than you might have expected. It's recommended to
anyone with an interest in psychiatric conditions or in Ireland. It's
not especially satisfactory to people with a more general interest in
DNA studies or in the various other genetic quirks that are
associated with Irish ancestry; Tracey's not reporting on those
topics in this book.
I wouldn't expect
Stalking Irish Madness to interest anyone below the age of
fifteen, but neither would I expect it to do much harm if the kiddies
did see it. Schizophrenia does tend to be identified by melodramatic
episodes; Tracey presents this information in about as informative,
non-sensational a way as it can be presented. Foul language is
occasionally quoted. One of the traditional diagnostic criteria for
schizophrenia is that true schizophrenics tend to become asexual
(this was why Freud thought that at least acknowledging heterosexual
instincts, even if a person sublimated them, was crucial to mental
health) and, fittingly, there's almost no overt sex in this book—the
love interest here is family love. I would share this book with a
twelve-year-old if the twelve-year-old was genetically at risk of
developing schizophrenia.
Otherwise, this is
pretty much a special-interest book, likely to interest and not
offend the minority who are interested in it...and now you know what's
in the book and whether you're in that minority or not.
Fair Trade Books are (as regular readers know) secondhand books offered for sale online at prices that allow us to send 10% of the total price to the author, if living. If you send salolianigodagewi @ yahoo.com $5 for one copy of Stalking Irish Madness + $5 for shipping one package, we'll send Tracey or the charity of his choice $1. If you want four copies of this book, send us $25, and we'll send Tracey or his charity $4. Of course, it's also possible to order different titles and, as long as all the books fit into one package, you pay only $5 for shipping but the authors of each Fair Trade Book offered for $5 receive $1 per copy. You might find a lower price at another web site, but, so far as we know, this is the only web site that supports writers by sending them payments when we resell secondhand books.
(volume one about the harper girl, volume three about the drummer boy, and in volume two they bond as friends not a couple) is pocket-sized. You could fit it and the adult 
trilogy and another paperback from the series, or even two, into one $5 package, which makes this web site's pricing more competitive than Amazon may initially suggest.
