9 Highland Road: Sane Living for the Mentally Ill » (REPRINT)

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.

Publishers Weekly

Julie Callahan, victim of her father's sexual and physical abuse, suffers multiple personality disorder. Anthony Constantine, a paranoid schizophrenic, wrestles with tormenting voices whose power is reduced somewhat by the drug clozapine. Stan Gunter, a polyglot pianist, plunged four stories after he heard God commanding him to jump over a balcony; miraculously he survived. These are some of the residents of a group home for the mentally ill in Glen Cove, N.Y., the focus of this harrowing account by New York Times national educational correspondent Winerip. Having spent two years at the home on a daily basis, he makes us care deeply about these people, their crises and breakthroughs in therapy. Beginning with coverage of community protests that aimed to prevent the home from opening in 1987, this narrative highlights warring state and local agencies, funding cutbacks and bureaucratic snafus; in so doing, it exposes glaring weaknesses in the mental health system. (June)