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Cold comfort

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Rosalind Ramsay
Rosalind Ramsay*
Affiliation:
University College and Middlesex School of Medicine, London W1N 8AA
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A psychiatrist's interest in human suffering is not restricted to daily work. Trainees in Oxford, asked to pick out six novels which had been important to them, chose books concerned with “alienation, sexuality and suicide” (Harrison & Day, 1988). Respondents to such a survey in the future might well include The Comforts of Madness (Sayer, 1988), surprise winner of the Constable Trophy for fiction in 1988 and subsequently the coveted Whitbread prize. It is former psychiatric nurse Paul Sayer's first book. He started writing in his twenties after taking a break from nursing to run a corner shop with his wife. In his spare time he read. He explains, “I was standing in the corner shop one day, and I just felt this urge to write” (Winder, 1989). He returned to nursing and at the same time, started to write about a world that was familiar to him.

Type
Psychiatry and the media
Information
Psychiatric Bulletin , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , March 1990 , pp. 170
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1989

References

Harrison, P. & Day, A. (1988) What do trainee psychiatrists actually read? Psychiatric Bulletin, 12, 530–531.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sayer, P. (1988) The Comforts of Madness. London: Constable; (1989) Sceptre.Google Scholar
Winder, R. (1989) Independent, Jan 26.Google Scholar
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