"For thirty years Mary Barnes was a schizophrenic. This is the story of her resurrection. 'The big muddle started before I was born,' she wrote in 1971. 'It went on, getting worse...when I was grown up in years, I got a vague idea there was a big split in me between my head and my heart. I seemed to go around thinking big thoughts in my head quite cut off from the life in my heart. In 1953, when I was for one year in Saint Bernard's Mental Hospital, I got put in a padded cell. I felt so bad, I lay without moving or eating, or making water or shits. They didn't let me die, they tube fed me. I wanted to be looked after. I didn't know then, I do now, that what I was trying to do was get back inside my Mother, to be reborn, to come up again, straight, and clear of all the mess.' In 1965 Mary Barnes found two psychiatrists, R. D. Laing and Joseph Berke, and Kingsley Hall, 'the place for me to go down and come up again.'"--Book jacket