Transforming Madness: New Lives For People Living With Mental Illness

In Imagining Robert, Jay Neugeboren told the sad, deeply personal, often shocking story of one man and one family's struggle against chronic mental illness. Now, in his wide-ranging, well-informed new book, he presents an overview of the entire field: a clear-eyed, articulate survey of our mental-health-care system's shortcomings and the new, effective, proven approaches that can make a real difference in the lives of the millions of Americans afflicted with severe mental illness, offering new hope to them and their families.

A book for general readers and professionals alike, Transforming Madness is at once a critique, a message of reassurance and hope, and a call to action with the impact of such groundbreaking books as The Other America and Death at an Early Age. Comprehensive, dramatic, and richly textured, it goes beyond mere indictment of what's wrong to point the way toward a promising future. Indeed, Transforming Madness is less about how the health system has failed America's mentally ill than it is about programs that work -- success stories that provide genuine hope for a permanent recovery. This book is unique in that it gives us the good news: while madness has hitherto had the power to transform us, we now have the knowledge and means to transform madness.