The Mind's Eye:

Before Julie Callahan came to the house at 9 Highland Road in Glen Cove, New York, she had spent a good part of her young life in mental hospitals, her mental and emotional coherence nearly destroyed by a childhood of sexual abuse. Fred Grasso, a schizophrenic, had lived in a filthy single-room occupancy hotel. At 9 Highland Road they and their housemates were given a decent alternative to lives in institutions or in the streets. It was a place in which some even found the chance to get better.

This perfectly observed and passionately imagined book takes us inside one of the supervised group homes that, in an age of shrinking state budgets and psychotropic drugs, have emerged as the backbone of America's mental health system. As it follows the progress and setbacks of residents, their families, and counselors and notes the embittered resistance their presence initially aroused in the neighborhood, 9 Highland Road succeeds in opening the locked world of mental illness. It does so with an empathy and insight that will change forever the way we understand and act in relation to that world. (Publisher's summary- Amazon.com)

Having worked in community mental health, I can honestly say that Winerup's depiction of 9 Highland road is both empathetic and accurate. He explores the politics and struggle to establish new housing as medical hospitals close, and he explores the constant struggle between the government, the staff, and the communities surrounding supportive living programs and group homes such as 9 Highland Road. The book does a wonderful job of casting some light on the extreme stigma that surrounds group homes and supportive living programs. Often these communities are built in well off areas where there are good tax dollars and good hospitals so that the people who are using the mental health services have good supports. This means then that the chronic sufferers of schizophrenia, autism, bipolar disorder and depression are nose to nose with the upper middle class mainstream. In reading about the reactions of the local community to the group homes, I remembered my own experiences of hurt and saddened residents who had experienced their neighbors as fearful and accusatory. Whenever a new person moved in to the complex where our program was housed, we received calls to the staff office claiming that our residents were weird, dirty, antisocial, or threatening. I asked one woman who called what the resident had done to make her feel threatened. She told me that he made eye contact with her when he was sitting on the stoop smoking, and tried to make conversation, which made her and her daughter uncomfortable. This man was a very nice, shy, soft spoken individual, but since he was part of a “program for crazy people,” his polite overtures were attacking and deranged in this woman's mind.

Winerip's portrayal of the group home also illustrates the long and frustrating cycle of successes and failures that mark the lives of many chronic sufferers of mental illness. His case studies are varied across disorders, family involvement and d support, and outcome. Most importantly, he shows the experience of housemate and staff interactions and how they effect the outcomes for many clients. Good supportive staff is extremely important in community mental health and it is often a thankless job with few rewards and a high volume of stress. This book depicts that clinical experience in all of its joys and challenges. I really enjoyed it and found it to be uplifting and rejuvenating for those days when spending another day coping with the downsides of mental health was too much. Give it a read on a day you need inspiration, or pick it up as a change from technical class readings.