Unspeakable

A humane, timely book about trauma and healing from one of the UK's leading psychiatrists. Adshead's previous book, The Devil You Know: Encounters in Forensic Psychiatry, also co-authored with Eileen Horne, was a Sunday Times bestseller. What does a traumatic event do to someone's identity? How do we talk about unbearable loss? Can trauma be passed from parents to children? What happens when trauma goes unspoken? How can we best help people after profoundly traumatic experiences? Dr Gwen Adshead worked at one of the UK's very first centres for traumatic stress, the Maudsley, and has treated patients for over thirty years. Here she invites the reader into the treatment room to shed light on the meaning of trauma, using case stories to explore common misunderstandings and myths. Adshead describes her work with a range of patients who have faced life-changing distress - from a widow fleeing conflict to the survivors of a helicopter crash, the victim of a mugging to a Prisoner of War. As she listens to their experiences, she helps these individuals to find new thoughts and new ways of relating to their bodies, their minds, their present. Their growth and healing lies not in recovering the old self, but in discovering the new. Filled with powerful insights on distress and discovery, change and hope, Unspeakable is a transformative book that has important implications for sufferers of trauma and those close to them.

Auteur

Gwen Adshead and Eileen Horne