Reviews for The Day the Voices Stopped: A Memoir of Madness and Hope

The average rating for The Day the Voices Stopped: A Memoir of Madness and Hope based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-06-13 00:00:00 Gabriel Ferrari I remember the night my mother came up to the bedroom my brother shared with me and told me that my uncle, who had been missing for many months, had been found - under the ice in the Fens in downtown boston, close to where he was living at the time. My uncle started hearing voices in his late teens/early twenties, and had been missing or in institutions most of my young life. When we did see him, he was charming, artistically gifted, and quiet. But we did not see him often - only heard that he was missing or in the hospital, and eventually that the voices he was hearing, that he thought was the voice of god, told him to drown himself in the river near his home. My grandfather, who was fighting cancer at the time, took a blow from the news, and died a year later. As a result, I was always both sympathetic and curious about the disease. We lived in a family that feared that we kids might develop the same plight, but, of course, we missed the bullet. No one is sure where my uncle inherited the disease from. Of all the books I have read concerning the topic of schizophrenia. this one was truelly the best. It is in no way the normal heartwarming tale you would expect of triumph over adversity. Diagnosed at 14, Ken is haunted by voices taunting him to kill himself. This goes on for 32 years, until one day, due to the prescription of a new a-typical schizophrenia drug, the voices stop, and in trying to build a new life for himself, in a strange new world, Steele goes on to be one of the most important mental health advocates of our time. The road he takes to get there, however, is painful and hard to read. He is abandoned by family, who had a second child, shortly after he is diagnosed, and then give up on their first son, to protect their second, and to try to keep away the shame involved in having a sick son. He is again and again forced into prostitution and life on the streets. Ken's tale takes him all over the country from institution to half-way house to society and back - all the way from Maine to Hawaii. Not for the easily upset, this story is a must for anyone who has any familiarity with this topic. This book gave me the gift of better understanding what my uncle, and many people like him, had to deal with and why some of them didn't make it. It is the most real story I have read. One that truelly parellels and illustrates the life of someone who is that sick and struggling to maintain some semblence of day to day life. It also made me better understand the need for change in both the health care system and society and how they go about treating/dealing with the mentally ill.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-10-04 00:00:00 Richard Kaplan This book changed my life and the way I look at people who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and the mental health system in general. I am currently a bio-medical student at Rutgers studying Psychological rehabilitation and we had to read this book for a literature review paper...but honestly, this assignment ended up becoming so much more to me. This man's book is so devastating, heart breaking, and at times it truly just makes you want to scream. All the lost cries of despair between these pages is just..overwhelming. I hope to one day meet Ken. He has experienced so much pain in this life, and if I ever met him, I would hug him right and tell him I'm sorry. I am one of those people that treats all people like family. This story breaks me.