Rating: 
Summary: 6 stories of mental health patients
Review: "I have learned that the only way to enter another's life is to find the vector points where my self & another self meet...There is no way, I believe, to do the work of therapy, which is, when all is said & done, the work of relationship, without finding your self in the patient & the patient's self in you. In this way, rifts within & between might be sealed, & the languages of our separate lives might come to share syllables, sentences, whole themes that bind us together".This comes from the preface of "Welcome to my country". And, if the whole message of the book had to be put in one paragraph, this is the one. Never in this book does Lauren Slater write from a position of power, of "me versus them". Through her own recovery, through battling her own problems (see "Three Spheres") she knows what it is to reach out & touch that dark part within ourselves: the fact that she keeps the access open to that part of herself, the "sick" part, open to be used for understanding & relating to patients...this shows a great sensitivity, is not very common, & makes the book interesting & different. Apart from this, the book contains 6 stories of therapy, the first in a group setting, the rest on an individual, one on one basis. All take place in the boston mental health clinic where the author worked, early in her practice. The stories are not the most original in the world, what makes the book original is SLater's personality & her writing, which often comes close to literature. I'm looking forward to more of her work.
Rating: 
Summary: Catching
Review: A beautiful book, catching, and extremely intersting. You'll find it hard to put down unless you've read it all.
Rating:
Summary: Interested in mental health? Read this book!
Review: A wonderful book of real-life, colorful experiences of a psychologist and the schizophrenic men and other patients with whom she has works. The author shows that her patients are often insightful, not unlike herself, sometimes enviable and sometimes tragic. Her prose is equally engaging One of my favorite books in a long time that I think is a must-read for everyone interested in the mental health profession, and a great read for everyone else
Rating:
Summary: The Art of Vulnerability
Review: Her work is not a work of non-fiction. She admits that she has changed the identities she has written about and confounded their settings. Therefore "Welcome To My Country" should be regarded as a work of fiction. But that is nothing to spit on.
I must confess that I feel a sense of dread and perverse anticipation when I look back on my reading of this book. Doctor Slater engages in what can only be called the art of vulnerability. She peels back the petals of many, many roses until we find, with a bit of shock, that the most central rose is both hers and our own. Her prose is cool but her spirit is warm. The theme of the erotic is constant through out this book and in all of its episodes. I was bewildered by this until in a sequence that lies near the end of the work she reveals exactly what country we are being welcomed to. Her own confessions are gut wrenching and are the kinds of expostulations that make me cringe as if I was being compelled to pay ear to the screechings of fingernails dragged across the surface of a black board.
There is a great beauty in this book. There is also something slightly clumsy and sweaty as Doctor Slater strives to make sense of the madness of her clients and her own madness.
A memoir of madness. Whose?
I will return to this book often.
Rating:
Summary: Compelling memoir of working and healing in a mental clinic
Review: I have to admit to a bias as I review this book. Lauren Slater was both my English student and, subsequently, my ³foster² daughter; in fact, her time living with my family
in our seventeenth-century house comprises part of the moving
last chapter of her book, a chapter in which she talks of
healing, her own and that of a patient¹s. The majority of the
book, which she terms ²creative non-fiction,² is her account of working with psychotic patients in a clinic in East Boston. Her descriptions of these patients, her ability to identify with them no matter how desperate their circumstances might seem, combined with her lyrical, metaphoric use of language makes this book compelling reading. The only question I asked myself as I read it was the extent to which I was reading ³fictionalized fact².
If the last chapter is typical, I can personally vouch for the fact that Ms. Slater took almost no liberties, except
to disguise names and some identifying details, suggesting that the rest of the book is largely true to life, albeit more beautifully expressed than one would expect the messy lives of the psychotic and neurotic persons who inhabit the pages to be.
I recommend it!
Rating:
Summary: An amazing book rich in thought
Review: I loved this book. I read it a while ago and just read her new book, Prozac Diary. After Prozac Diary, my love for Lauren Slater's writing was renewed and I went back and re-read Welcome to My Country. I love her honesty, her way of dealing with her patients, and her thoughts on them. She writes in a poetic like manner which makes her words even more enriched. I will always look forward to reading more books by Lauren Slater.
Rating:
Summary: Great read
Review: I profitted from reading this very insightful work on dealing with handicapped people
Rating:
Summary: some wonderful insights, well told
Review: i tore through this book in about 4 hours, but came away very impressed. what really is dazzling is the compassion and tenderness the author feels for her patients.
Rating:
Summary: Compelling memoir of working and healing in a mental clinic
Review: Ihave to admit to a bias as I review this book. Lauren Slater was both my English student and, subsequently, my ³foster² daughter; in fact, her time living with my family in our seventeenth-century house comprises part of the moving last chapter of her book, a chapter in which she talks of healing, her own and that of a patient¹s. The majority of the book, which she terms ²creative non-fiction,² is her account of working with psychotic patients in a clinic in East Boston. Her descriptions of these patients, her ability to identify with them no matter how desperate their circumstances might seem, combined with her lyrical, metaphoric use of language makes this book compelling reading. The only question I asked myself as I read it was the extent to which I was reading ³fictionalized fact². If the last chapter is typical, I can personally vouch for the fact that Ms. Slater took almost no liberties, except to disguise names and some identifying details, suggesting that the rest of the book is largely true to life, albeit more beautifully expressed than one would expect the messy lives of the psychotic and neurotic persons who inhabit the pages to be. I recommend it!
Rating:
Summary: Fearful Redemption
Review: Lauren Slater has guts. We've had decades and decades of first hand accounts of mental illness by those who have worked with the afflicted, but Slater is singular in her unwillingness to spare the layman's sensibilities.
Slater's book is a first hand account of her journey through life with a house full of schizophrenics, some doomed and some just in the reach of redemption. She herself is driven to the emotional brink trying to bring something whole out of these irretrievably wounded people. In one scene she practically breaks down trying to convince a group of schizophrenics that the imaginary UFO they want to take off in as a group simply isn't there. She works with a borderline sociopath male chauvinist, every inch the ruthless alphamale, who brutalizes his girlfriend and in his spare time watches sadomasochistic pornography films--all symptoms of his underlying terror of the feminine. Miraculously, despite her disgust with this guy, she gets somewhere with him.
This is not light reading but necessary reading.
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