Walking through Cavendish Square on my way to work I purchased a copy of the Big Issue and the man selling it proudly pointed to a photo of himself inside this weeks copy. “They took that just over there,” he said, pointing in the direction of Harley Street where I work. “Fabulous” I said, “I look forward to reading it.”This week ‘The Big’ issue focuses its attention on books and why they matter.
Reading changed my life but I didn’t start to read seriously until I was in my early thirties and recovering from a mental breakdown and in recovery from my addiction to drugs and alcohol. After my breakdown I became a voracious reader and developed a love and deep passion for literature and with it my world grew bigger. I started to relate to and have relationships with writers and fictional characters who put my own mental health problems into the of perspective of the human condition.
Kurt Vonnegut spoke about his own breakdown without the shame that I had experienced. He wrote about his breakdown in his novels and non fiction writing. It was not surprising that Vonnegut went mad. He miraculously survived the bombing of Dresden while being held as a prisoner of war in the city. He tells the story of his World War Two experience in his classic novel Slaughter House Five.
As I write this sitting in the comfort of the cafe of Foyles book shop my brother is also a prisoner. He is not a prisoner of war but he could arguably be described as a prisoner from the war on drugs. He is serving a five year prison sentence for robbery and admits that he deserves to be in prison. He has been in and out of prison since he was seventeen, he is now fifty one. My brother can read but I know that he has never had a relationship with books and a love of reading in the way that I have. I read this morning that they average reading age of men in the UK prison system is 11 years old. I am not surprised by this statistic but it made me feel sad and then angry. The UK currently has the highest prison population in Europe with over 80,000 men serving a custodial sentence.
I work as a psychotherapist and know that mental health and society are intrinsically link. I believe that I am writing this and not selling The Big Issue or experiencing a similar fate as my brother because I discovered that books matter and then slowly found that I matter too.
