Review: En dåre fri

En dåre fri by Beate Grimsrud

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Interesting insight into the Swedish psychiatry care and a person's experience with the psychiatry and world-view when suffering from schizophrenia.

The story is about Eli, a Norwegian woman who from early childhood started to hear voices in her head. The voices are created during traumatic events in her life to help her get through the hardships. Interestingly enough, all the voices are male characters.

The book is written in a 1:st POV style, which makes it even more personal and makes you experience the experiences of schizophrenia in a much more personal way. The beginning of the book is quite messy, jumping from childhood to the present, thoughts scrambled. Once you get use to it, it's a nice touch, as it adds to experience.

It's thought-worthy, I can see why we had to read a novel in our social work class about disabilities. nonfiction is good as well, of course, but novels gives you that extra emotion that makes you understand better how real humans experience and think about society, disabilities, etcetera.

In this book you get to understand how real the voices and the paranoia is for the person having this disability. How hard it is to express your thoughts and frustrations, to ignore the voices in one's head. You as the reader knows that the voices isn't real, that nothing will happen if she doesn't obey the voices commands, but for her it's so real. It's fascinating to see her battle with it, and her disconnection to the society norms. For example, she could undress and swim naked in a city lake, not knowing how her adult-woman body could be viewed and interpret as, as in her head it could be well be the 6-year-old boy-voice that took the swim, not the grown female she. It was also interesting to read how she felt about the psychiatry and the medicine. You also got to read her medical records here and there, giving a contrast between her reality and the medical view of her condition and behaviours.

A book recommended.



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