Stalking Irish Madness: Searching for the Roots of My Family's Schizophrenia » (Bargain)

Patrick Tracey, a former contributing writer for the Washington City Paper and Regardie’s in Washington, D.C., has also written for Ms. magazine and the Washington Post. He is the author of two nonfiction collections of biographical essays for the American Profiles series. After twenty-five years on his own twisted road, Tracey now lives with his sisters in Boston, Massachusetts.

In this powerful, sometimes harrowing, deeply felt story, Patrick Tracey journeys to Ireland to track the origin and solve the mystery of his Irish-American family's multigenerational struggle with schizophrenia.

For most Irish Americans, a trip to Ireland is often an occasion to revisit their family's roots. But for Patrick Tracey, the lure of his ancestral home is a much more powerful need: part pilgrimage, part investigation to confront the genealogical mystery of schizophrenia–a disease that had claimed a great-great-great-grandmother, a grandmother, an uncle, and, most recently, two sisters.

As long as Tracey could remember, schizophrenia ran on his mother's side, seldom spoken of outright but impossible to ignore. Devastated by the emotional toll the disease had already taken on his family, terrified of passing it on to any children he might have, and inspired by the recent discovery of the first genetic link to schizophrenia, Tracey followed his genealogical trail from Boston to Ireland's county Roscommon, home of his oldest-known schizophrenic ancestor. In a renovated camper, Tracey crossed the Emerald Isle to investigate the country that, until the 1960s, had the world's highest rate of institutionalization for mental illness, following clues and separating fact from fiction in the legendary relationship the Irish have had with madness.

Tracey's path leads from fairy mounds and ancient caverns still shrouded in superstition to old pubs whose colorful inhabitants are a treasure trove of local lore. He visits the massive and grim asylum where his famine starved ancestors may have lived. And he interviews the Irish research team that first cracked the schizophrenic code to learn how much–and how little–we know about this often misunderstood disease.

Filled with history, science, and lore, Stalking Irish Madness is an unforgettable chronicle of one man's attempt to make sense of his family's past and to find hope for the future of schizophrenic patients.

The Washington Post - Nell Casey

The first part of the book chronicles Tracey's lineage, and here the author offers astute descriptions of schizophrenia and the various ways it has taken hold of family members. But soon—sooner than the reader may like—he is journeying to Ireland to broaden his story, specifically to County Roscommon, where his ancestors are from and where, coincidentally, researchers discovered a gene linked to schizophrenia in 2002. But Tracey never pins down his ancestry or the answers he is seeking. Upon his return, he admits to being no closer to understanding the illness, but the journey has brought him closer to his sisters, both now spending their days at centers for the mentally ill. This anticlimax is the most moving testimony of the book: It makes painfully clear that both sorrow and surrender, crucially intertwined, attend efforts to bring meaning to the puzzle of mental illness.

I The Twisted Strand

Ch. 1 Away with the Fairies 3

Ch. 2 Madness Gallops 19

Ch. 3 The First Pounce 35

Ch. 4 The Second Pounce 47

Ch. 5 Too Much for Mom 59

II The Irish Roots

Ch. 6 Bog of No Return 69

Ch. 7 London Calling 83

Ch. 8 Beware the Moon 99

Ch. 9 Chasing Egans 117

Ch. 10 Driven to Ballinasloe 131

Ch. 11 Grace of the Gargle 147

Ch. 12 A Celtic Walkabout 159

Ch. 13 Grand Old Men 173

Ch. 14 No Gilding Lilies 189

Ch. 15 Lord of the Glen 203

Ch. 16 The Pearl of Galway 215

Ch. 17 Back to Roscommon 227

III The Haze of the Homefront

Ch. 18 Schizophrenia in Wonderland 239

Ch. 19 We Are Family 247

Notes 259

Index 265