I Never Promised You a Rose Garden: A Novel

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden: A Novel
by Joanne Greenberg

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden: A Novel
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Book Summary Information

Author: Joanne Greenberg
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-01-06
ISBN: 0805089268
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks

Book Reviews of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden: A Novel

Book Review: No change of diet, no drugs, just psychotherapy
Summary: 5 Stars

Rossa Forbes is a contributor to Goddess Shift: Women Leading for a Change

This book is a fictionalized version of the author's recovery from schizophrenia within the confines of a mental institution. Her journey (the book was published in 1963) was undertaken without the use of antipsychotics and her progress rested on good old-fashioned psychotherapy. It stands in refreshing and sharp contrast to the way mental illnesses have been treated since the 1970s.

Through personal experience I have come to see the sorry state to which modern psychiatry has fallen in the intervening decades. Psychotherapy has been largely rejected as a therapy for schizophrenia in favour of antipsychotic medication. This situation is changing slightly because the drugs are finally beginning to be acknowledged as ineffective in the majority of patients. Psychotherapy is now getting a "re-think". What is remarkable about I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, apart from the sheer brilliance of its prose and insights, is that the author's recovery happened without a change of diet, the use of supplements or even energy medicine. It came about painfully, over time, through exploring the belief system that the young girl had constructed in order to protect herself from real and imagined family hurts. The exploration of the family belief system between the girl and her psychiatrist is very relevant to the Family Constellation Therapy that our family underwent.

There is hardly any information on the market today about recovery from schizophrenia, beyond advice on continuing to take your medication, to have "realistic" expectations and to monitor yourself for signs of relapse. I believe that one of the explanations for this lack of information is that many doctors believe that recovery from schizophrenia is not possible and that anyone who "recovers" probably didn't have schizophrenia to begin with. (Joanne Greenberg would beg to differ.) Just getting off the medications is not recovery for most people. It is only the beginning of recovery. The roller coaster ride of recovery is painful and long. Set-backs often look like relapse. The temptation is always there to go back on the medications, which adds a further painful dimension, the worry over whether you are doing the right thing. Very few people believe, thanks to the power of the pharmaceutical lobby, that recovery is possible without medication. Many people believe that the medications are meant for life (and the doctors will tell you so). Many people are waiting for the next miracle drug - a drug that, in my opinion, will never fix the problems of the psyche.

Summary of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden: A Novel

The classic novel about a young woman?s struggle against madness, now a Holt Paperback, with a new afterword by the author

Hailed by The New York Times as "convincing and emotionally gripping" upon its publication in 1964, Joanne Greenberg?s semiautobiographical novel stands as a timeless and unforgettable portrayal of mental illness. Enveloped in the dark inner kingdom of her schizophrenia, sixteen-year-old Deborah is haunted by private tormentors that isolate her from the outside world. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a mental hospital where she will spend the next three years battling to regain her sanity with the help of a gifted psychiatrist. As Deborah struggles toward the possibility of the "normal" life she and her family hope for, the reader is inexorably drawn into her private suffering and deep determination to confront her demons.

A modern classic, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden remains every bit as poignant, gripping, and relevant today as when it was first published.

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