Cork University Press

Psychiatrist Heal Yourself- Ivor Browne: Music and Madness

Ivor Browne: Music and Madness By Ivor Browne

Published in hardback by Atrium, an imprint of Cork University Press on 4 April 2008, price €25 ISBN  9780955226120

In a career spanning over 50 years, Professor Ivor Browne has been at the forefront of psychiatric care in Ireland. Music and Madness is a fascinating insight into one of Ireland’s true thinker-pioneers, and also an insight into Ireland itself.

Looking back on his career, Ivor Browne notes a ‘deep dissatisfaction’ with the direction that psychiatry and the treatment of mental illness has taken in Ireland. He calls attention to the ‘world-wide pandemic of mindless prescription drug misuse by psychiatrists and other physicians to patients who may not need them.

Hugely idealistic and often a thorn in the side of the establishment, his approach throughout his career has been always marked by a passion for healing and a real desire to reach people in their distress, while balancing the politics and frustration that goes with being part of the Irish health system. His views are sure to cause controversy, both within the psychiatric profession and further afield.

He feels that psychiatric services in Ireland should follow a person-centred, psychotherapeutic approach. Unless there is a real change in the training of psychiatrists and in their methods of working, then psychiatry will continue its journey down a blind alley with almost total dependence on medical interventions using antidepressants and other prescription drugs.

Ivor Browne says that it is the person who has to undertake the work himself if he is to bring about any real change in his life. Any change and any new learning will involve pain. Many psychiatrists seem to have missed this point entirely. They think that by giving tranquillizers and temporarily relieving symptoms something had been achieved, whereas in fact, no real change has taken place and sooner or later the person will slip back with a recurrence of his symptoms.

The book includes an introduction by Colm Tóibín who discusses how Ivor Browne’s therapy helped him deal with the suppressed grief of his father’s death. He calls Ivor Browne ‘a towering and powerful influential figure in Irish psychiatry.’

Writer Sebastian Barry calls the book ‘The finest example of a certain type of radical Irish life since Noel Browne's Against the Tide. Vivid, strange, moving, brilliant.’

Apart from discussing his personal journey as a psychiatrist, he reveals his love of music, particularly jazz, and the role this has played in his life.

About Ivor Browne

Ivor Browne was born in Dublin. After his initial studies at the Royal College of Surgeons he worked in Oxford, London, Harvard and Dublin and went on to become Professor of Psychiatry at University College, Dublin and Chief Psychiatrist of the Eastern Health Board. He took the care of mental patients away from large institutions and brought it into the community.

He conceived and was director of the Irish Foundation for Human Development. This set up the first Community Association in Ireland in Ballyfermot, one of the early large housing estates in Dublin. An offshoot was established in Derry, called the Inner City Trust, which not only rebuilt, but transformed the city of Derry during the years it was being torn down by both sides in the conflict.

Ivor Browne’s early wish was to be a jazz musician but TB prevented that.

Some of his favourite memories of his time in the US were the live performances he attended of some of the jazz greats at the time – Coleman Hawkins, Flip Phillips, Illinois Jaquet. He has a deep and abiding interesting Irish traditional music.

Ivor Browne: Music and Madness tipped to be summer bestseller

The Irish Independent on Saturday April 5th has said that all told Music and Madness is a fascinating insight into the mind of one of Ireland's true thinker-pioneers and, in passing, into Ireland itself. It's going to be this summer's big bestseller. Ivor Browne: Music and Madness Other reviews so far Music and Madness is the finest example of a certain type of radical Irish life since Noel Browne’s Against the Tide. Vivid, strange, moving, brilliant. Sebastian Barry, writer This is an open, honest and deeply personal account of Ivor Browne’s personal and professional journey to discover the sense behind much of what we regard as madness. His central message is that healing and integration are possible, if we are willing to “unfreeze” our inner lives and experience genuine hurt and pain that we have disavowed. This book is written in a style that is accessible and compassionate; it leaves one with renewed hope and with a reverence for the mystery embodied in every human being. Dr Tony Bates, psychologist Music and Madness, by the eminent psychiatrist Ivor Browne, should hearten anyone who has ever felt gauche, inadequate, unwanted, a failure, a ‘mistake’, lonely; the honesty of this memoir is remarkable. It’s an inspiring book. Tom Murphy, playwright Music and Madness is a brilliant book that needed to be written, and deserves to be read by as many people as possible; psychiatrists, other mental health workers, psychiatric patients, policy makers and members of the general public; in fact, any one who has ever experienced psychological trauma or suffering in their own lives, or in their families or communities. Drawing daringly and courageously on his personal and professional experience a s a U.C.D. and Harvard trained scientist and psychiatrist, Professor Browne, like many of the great psychological and psychiatric thinker-pioneers before him, explains how he has derived his empirical ideas and therapeutic approaches though 50 years of hands-on observation and interaction with psychiatric patients, families, institutions and even whole communities undergoing or crisis or breakdown. Calling attention to what can only be regarded as a world-wide pandemic of mindless prescription drug misuse by psychiatrists and other physicians to patients who may not need them, Professor Browne warns that use of these medications, while sometimes essential to achieve some short-term and long term therapeutic gains, may also block access to natural healing resources in the patient that are essential for recovery from trauma and breakdown, and which can be mobilized more efficiently and safely through various forms of individual and holistic group psychotherapy with a spiritual foundation. Professor Browne, who uses psychotropic medications in his private practice of psychiatry when indicated, emphasizes that whether such drugs are indicated in treatment, they should not be permitted to postpone or eliminate altogether the vital therapeutic opportunity for personal experience of “authentic suffering” that he regards as being essential to the overall healing process that leads to recovery from mental illness and addiction. Important and crucial to our understanding of the “human condition” as I believe Music and Madness to be, I am sure it will cause controversy, and in all probability will be received by the psychiatric community with some measure of outrage and even rebuke. Garrett O’Connor, M.D. Chief Executive Officer The Betty Ford Institute for Addiction Research, Prevention and Education Rancho Mirage, California. USA

Weaving Tapestry in a Rural Ireland

Weaving Weaving Tapestry in a Rural Ireland: TAIPÉIS GAEL, DONEGAL by Meghan Nuttall Sayres was published by Cork University Press under its trade imprint Atrium.

Weaving Tapestry in Rural Ireland is the story of a group of young weavers in the Gaeltacht, the Irish speaking section of Donegal, who with the help of village elders formed a tapestry weaving cooperative called Taipéis Gael. Weaving Tapestry in Rural Ireland, this account of the Donegal weaving co-operative features accounts of the various processes; as well as interviews with weavers, spinners and dyers; and has 103 colour photographs of tapestries. This book brings into focus key aspects of our heritage and shows how traditional skills were adopted to produce modern tapestries of great beauty and originality.

Cool Waters Wins Best Irish Cover Design

        Cool Waters, Emerald Seas: Diving Temperate Waters, published by Cork University Press, has won the Best Cover Design at the CLÉ Irish Book Industry Awards. The winner of the award was  announced on the 17th  February 2007 at the CLÉ Conference in the Fitzwiliam Hotel, Dublin, Ireland. -Cool Waters, Emerald Seas: Diving Temperate Waters  (ISBN 978-0-95353-538-5, Hardback, 250 x 250mm 200 pp, €29.95, £19.95).

The book cover was designed  by John Foley who is founder and Creative Director of Bite! - a Cork-based design studio which has been designing publications and publicity material for a broad range of clients in the Irish arts, culture, entertainment and publishing sectors since 1991. He is a member of the Institute of Designers in Ireland (IDI).

John Collins, who is an award-winning photographer with a special interest in the sea, took the cover photograph. Cool Waters, Emerald Seas: Diving Temperate Waters is his first book and is already beng celebrated as one of the finest collections of underwater images from the world's temperate seas. John is a graduate of the New York Institute of Photography.

Cool Waters, Emerald Seas: Diving Temperate Waters takes us on a marine adventure within the oceans that lap many of our most populated shores, from the north Atlantic around western Europe, to the chilly Pacific of North America and south to the Great White sharks of Africa. This photographic portrait of a little explored part of our ocean world is the culmination of twenty years of diving the seas around Ireland, Scotland, Canada, South Africa and Tasmania.

PLoS, Losing Money, Hikes Author Fees

It seems that open access journal publishing, known as the "gold" version of OA, isn't paved with gold. In an eye-opening analysis in the journal Nature, the Public Library of Science (PLoS), which launched its first open access journals in 2003, is said to be facing a "looming financial crisis." According to Nature, which analyzed the non-profit PLoS's publicly available records on file with the Internal Revenue Service, PLoS ran a deficit of almost $1 million last year, and its total income from fees and advertising currently covers just 35 percent of its costs. While revenue is increasing slightly, spending is increasing at a greater clip, up to $5.5 million over the past three years combined. In response, with its grant funds being steadily depleted, PLoS has announced that it will raise author fees, effective July 1, for its open access journals from $1500 to $2500 for flagship journals PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine; and to $2000 for its community journals PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics, and PLoS Pathogens.

From Library Journal

In a release, officials from the non-profit PLoS said that, with three years of operational experience to draw on, it was "time to adjust this model so that our publication fees reflect more closely the costs of publication." Still, even with the increased fees, Nature reports that PLoS will have to rely on "philanthropy" to survive for the foreseeable future, including its funding from the Sandler and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundations. PLoS director of publishing Mark Patterson downplayed the financial situation, noting that the fledgling publisher is only in its fourth year. Still, more than a few commercial publishers may be saying "I told you so." In the early days of open access publishing, commercial publishers repeatedly suggested that author fees for PLoS, at $1500, and for-profit open access publisher BioMed Central, then $500, were unsustainably low. Last year, BioMed Central increased its author fees, from $525 to as much as $1700. Commercial competitors, meanwhile, including Springer, Blackwell, and most recently Elsevier, have begun offering open-access-like publishing options, for fees closer to $3000.

Association of American University Presses annual meeting

Late last week the Association of American University Presses held its annual meeting in New Orleans.  While the word “digital” and its variants appeared in the title of many a session, it is clear that new media can be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, the association has been able to increase the visibility of its members’ output through the Books for Understanding Web site, which offers a convenient and reliable guide to academic titles on topics of public interest.  At the same time, the market for university-press titles used in courses has been undercut by the ready availability of secondhand books online.

And then there’s Google Book Search. The AAUP has not joined the Authors Guild’s class action suit against Google for digitizing copyrighted materials. But university presses belong to the class of those with an interest in the case — so the organization has incurred legal expenses while monitoring developments on behalf of its members. One got the definite impression that the other shoe may yet drop in this matter. During the business meeting, Givler (the association’s executive director) indicated that the association would be undertaking a major action soon that would place additional demands on the organization’s resources. I tried to find out more, but evidently its Board of Directors is playing its cards close to the vest for now.

How Amazon.com ranks bestsellers

WebProNews takes a look at how Amazon.com ranks its bestsellers. "In actuality, the process is somewhat more convoluted than they let on. Only the top 10,000 books are updated every hour and the ranking does not depend upon the actual number of books sold, but rather, on a comparison against the sales figures of the other 9,999 books within that same hour. Simultaneously, a trending calculation is applied to arrive at a computerised sales trajectory."

"Books with rankings between 10,000 and 100,000 are recalculated once a day, rather than once an hour. Current projections, as well as historic sales information play a key role in these calculations. In fact, the predictive nature of the Amazon ranking system is what makes it possible for a newly-released book to outrank an older established title, even though the actual sales figures for the latter far exceed the former."

FromThe Bookseller

Skirmish continues between some U.S. and U.K. publishers

In the latest round of skirmishing between some U.S. and U.K. publishers over sales in continental Europe, five European booksellers and distributors in Lisbon, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Paris have sent an open letter to publishers in the U.S. and U.K. opposing British efforts to obtain exclusive rights to sell English-language books in Europe, today's New York Times reported. (The issue was the topic of a major panel at BEA.)

The letter urged all publishers involved "to strongly reject any effort to restrict competition in the market," adding, "In a global market, this would be an atavistic move because it means a return to protectionism and an attack on cultural diversity."

The Paris bookseller who signed the letter, Odile Hellier, owner of Village Voice Bookshop, commented: "My customers are extremely sensitive to the American or English paperbacks. Americans love to buy the U.K. editions here because they don't see them at home and vice versa. The U.K. people love to see American jackets. It's the diversity which is important."

From Shelf Awareness

Canadian used bookstore thrives

Patrick Hempelmann, owner of two used bookstores called BMV (books, music and videos) in Toronto, is opening a third, which, at 15,000 square feet and 200,000 books, will be much larger than the other two.

Interestingly he told the Toronto Star:

"The traditional concept of the used bookstore is basically dead: to wait for people to look for books that are out of print and hard to find, and therefore be able to charge a high price because of the rarity of what you are selling, that idea has been destroyed by ABE and by the Internet. There are very few books that are hard to find now.

"What still works," he continued, "is to sell good books, remainders, review copies, used and hurt books and sell them cheaper, much much cheaper, than you'd pay at Indigo or Chapters. In the U.S., the used book business is growing faster than the new."

From Shelf Awareness

Six million sign-up to Borders rewards scheme

Internet Retailer reports from its 2006 conference where Borders Group said that its use of rich media and an online loyalty program had attracted 6 million members in its first two months.

"Our mission is to be the preferred place for knowledge and entertainment," senior vice president, chief marketing officer and head of e-commerce Michael Tam is reported to have said. Borders wants customers to get the same level of shopping experience when shopping online from home as they get in a Borders store, he added.

From The Bookseller