Asylum

A story of self-obsession narrated by the point of view of a psychiatrist, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. As a psychiatrist in a top-security mental hospital in the 1950s, Peter Cleave has made a study of what he calls 'the catastrophic love affair characterized by sexual obsession.' His experience is extensive, and he is never surprised. Until, that is, he comes reluctantly to accept that the wife of one of his colleagues has embarked on such an affair...

As a psychiatrist in a top-security mental hospital in the 1950s, Peter Cleave has made a study of what he calls 'the catastrophic love affair characterized by sexual obsession.' His experience is extensive, and he is never surprised. Until, that is, he comes reluctantly to accept that the wife of one of his colleagues has embarked on such an affair.

Light Asylum: Light Asylum (LP + CD). 1 CD, 1 LP

Artist, Charles Bragg brings us a view of his own special reality—and sheds new light on what we know of our own.In Asylum Earth, nothing is quite as it seems. Toulouse-Laurec shares a room with El Greco in «Art Heaven,» while back among the living, an irate «Letter to the Editor» demands that someone go in and finish «all those impressionist paintings—why leave just an impression?»Irrelevant and brilliantly funny, Bragg brings us a view of his own special reality—and sheds new light on what we know of our own. Witticisms, satire, and irony abound, and no profession or institution escapes Bragg's sharp eye. Often compared to Daumier, Nast, and Bosch, Bragg is a master of observation. Once our human frailties are scrutinized by his myopic gaze, we may never see ourselves in quite the same way again! Illustrated throughout with Bragg's paintings and etchings.

Malaysian psychiatric services and policy show some similar developments to those of the West. Yet much of the rhetoric that has informed these changes internationally have yet to be fully embraced in a modern, industrialised nation seeking to develop services congruent with the complex and rich diversity of ethnicity, culture and geography in the region. The relevance of this unique and extensive ethnographic study is that it captures the fascinating and otherwise lost voices of Malaysian service users, in a cultural context where a scientific, positivistic discourse prevails. However, its aims are more far reaching in that while providing an account that straddles the fault lines of both medical sociology and medical anthropology, it also critically engages with intriguing historiographic accounts of imperial and colonial psychiatry. These serve to illuminate the ideologies and practices underpinning the colonial psychiatric mission across the nineteenth century in Asia and Africa, and which today hold identifiable influences, both for good and ill, in contemporary psychiatric services in post-colonial nations, such as Malaysia. As such this book will appeal not only to social scientists but also to mental health professions working with a culturally diverse client base.

Asylum Denied is the gripping story of political refugee David Ngaruri Kenney's harrowing odyssey through the world of immigration processing in the United States. Kenney, while living in his native Kenya, led a boycott to protest his government's treatment of his fellow farmers. He was subsequently arrested and taken into the forest to be executed. This book, told by Kenney and his lawyer Philip G. Schrag from Kenney's own perspective, tells of his near-murder, imprisonment, and torture in Kenya; his remarkable escape to the United States; and the obstacle course of ordeals and proceedings he faced as U.S. government agencies sought to deport him to Kenya. A story of courage, love, perseverance, and legal strategy, Asylum Denied brings to life the human costs associated with our immigration laws and suggests reforms that are desperately needed to help other victims of human rights violations.