Henry's Demons: Living with Schizophrenia, a Father and Son's Story

By Patrick Cockburn and Henry Cockburn

On a cold February day two months after his 20th birthday, Henry Cockburn waded into the Newhaven estuary outside Brighton and tried to swim across, almost drowning in the process. The trees, he said, had told him to do it.

Nearly halfway around the world, in Kabul, Afghanistan, journalist Patrick Cockburn learned that Henry, his son, had been admitted to a hospital mental ward and appeared to be suffering a mental breakdown. Ten days later, Henry was officially diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Thus begins Patrick and Henry's extraordinary account of Henry's steep descent into mental illness and of Patrick's journey towards understanding the changes it has wrought.

With remarkable candour, Patrick writes of the seven years since, years Henry has spent almost entirely in mental hospitals. Schizophrenics are at high risk for suicide, and Patrick and his wife live in constant fear for Henry's life. Patrick also provides a fascinating glimpse into the conflicted history of schizophrenia's diagnosis and treatment and shows how little we still know about this debilitating condition.

The book also includes Henry's own account of his experiences. In these raw and eerily beautiful chapters written from the hospital, he tells of the visions and voices that urge him on and of the sense that he has discovered something magical and profound.

Together, Patrick's and Henry's stories create one of the most nuanced and revealing portraits of mental illness ever written, and a stirring memoir of family, parenthood, and the courage it takes to persevere and emerge, at last, whole.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Release date: Feb 3, 2011
• ISBN: 9781847377111

Patrick Cockburn

Patrick Cockburn is Iraq correspondent for the Independent in London. He has received the Martha Gellhorn prize for war reporting, the James Cameron Award, and the Orwell Prize for Journalism. He is the author of Muqtada, about war and rebellion in Iraq; The Occupation (shortlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2007); The Broken Boy, a memoir; and with Andrew Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein.

Reviews for Henry's Demons

[RW · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An excellent account of how it feels to have schizophrenia, how it affects the sufferer and the family.

[Mary O'Hara · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very good insight in to mental illness. It helps to make people understand what the family's go through as well.

[daftboy1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is the true story narrated by Patrick and Henry Cockburn, Father and son, Henry has a mental illness and once he is sectioned he keeps trying to escape from the mental hospitals. Patrick is a War correspondent so isn't always home to look after him. This book tells the story from both Father and Sons point of view. OK book bit to much details in places for me though.

[petra5xs · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Forgive me my reviews when they descend into stories. Sometimes a book brings back memories that illuminate one or other for me and since most of my reviews here and elsewhere are unread by anyone except me, I write them primarily for myself. I am wary of using real names as I have real-life friends and family in my list of friends, but sometimes it wouldn't make sense not to.

When I was a teenager, I lived in a shared house with a guy who was beautiful with blond shaggy hair, a lean body and was a virtuoso guitar player; everything that attracts young women. So when he suggested a walk one day on the disused Beeching railway track I was thrilled. It was so romantic walking in the sunshine, picking wild flowers, chatting and laughing and feeling free and he talked about such odd, different things I had never thought of. It was less of a thrilling free feeling when he wanted me to lie down on the railway track and bury me in stones and cover my head in flowers 'for beauty's sake'. He was a great big man, over 6' and I was very petite. He was very insistent so I laid down and he put some stones, small clinker from between the tracks on me and then went off to look for bigger ones. I ran!

Later that night, the house was full of red wine, weed and the boy playing his beautiful guitar. When people had left the room and we were alone for probably a moment he locked the door. It was ok, I left by the French windows and everyone went to bed except for the boy who stayed up playing guitar until dawn.

Next day we phoned his parents to tell them that they must come and get their son, that he needed help. A few days later we heard that his parents had gone out and he had made a big pile of their furniture in the garden, apparently intending to burn it, but when they came back he was in the shower screaming about the needles coming down and penetrating his skin. He said he was the new Christ of her Pain. My pain. His name was Christopher Paine.

Months went by, we had occasional reports, he was in and out of mental homes, doing well or not so well. Years went by, same thing. Eventually he settled down and became an opthalmologist we heard.

That was one of the true encounters I have had with schizophrenics of whom I have known three very well. Another drooled and wrote long poems of what he'd like to do to me which wasn't overtly sexual but very weird. A third refused to speak on Sundays because Ayn Rand didn't (she did, actually).

That's what it was really like being with someone who had a totally other frame of reference. In the book the father relates his son's differences but it didn't have the colour and the feeling of any experiences I had. Its not an illness where they are 'out of it' for years at a time and occasionally surfacing into this world, but more where someone has a frame of reference of their own invention for interpreting sights and sounds and therefore their responses are out of synch with the rest of the world. They cannot live with us and its terrible to have to live with them, you neither want to be harmed not let them cause themselves harm.

[polarbear123_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An interesting read this one, if not wholly satisfying. I found it hard to like Henry Cockburn contrary to all those that seem to meet him in the book. His hallucinations combined a lot with popular culture which to me makes him come across as a bit of an annoying attention seeker. Yes I know that he is suffering from a mental disorder but then again so am I and so are thousands of people so I have a right to criticise. On the other hand I did find his story compelling and it was well worth a read. It just didn't give me the answers I wanted.

[veracruzlynn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As a parent of an adult daughter with autism and mental illness, and son with autism who died of schizophrenia at age 21, I ate this book up--page by page. First, the book illustrates something most books are too squeamish to approach: mental illness is not fought in a few months or a year or two years, and it is not fought gently. It is sweaty, bloody, tiring, day by day, week by week, month and year and maybe years' fight that leaves all of us often sobbing, praying, losing hope, hoping again, sometimes believing, sometimes not, always loving our children, raging at doctors and case managers and cold hearted keepers of services our children need, yet will not give. Second, this book lets us read Henry Cockburn's defiantly, bravely honest memoir of those years. He explains in Hemingway-like prose that his hallucinations were real, beautiful, and part of his being, his self, and opened him to a new world and new understandings. He shows us that he rejected the meds in order to not lose all of this, even those it meant that he came near death over and over, and later also began to suffer more common, negative hallucinations. Most importantly, this is a valid look at the idea of hallucinations and psychosis as part of one's own being, and belonging to one.I admit that I wept through this book. I agonized with the Cockburns, and I was surprised to find myself agonizing with Henry--I, with all my trying to understand my children, had never understood them before. This is the greatest gift this book gave me. Thank you Henry--I wish you could meet my daughter as you would be great friends.

[claudiachernov · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A short book, telling of schizophrenia from the patient's and from his father's points of view. The chapters written by the patient himself are eerie, and I'm glad I read them.