The Writing Site of Michael Black
A European Playwright writing in English

Mental Health Memoirs

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe", Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In 2003, after ten years worth of encounters with the English NHS psychiatric system, I decided to tell the story my way, and started writing the autobiography Stealing Heaven From God . The title refers to an idea I'd had when pondering God's seemingly eternal existence whilst living in York in 1993. I wanted to steal Heaven from Him to make Him homeless, and, ultimately, I wanted to kill Him. Frederich Nietzsche was the first person to announce that "God is dead" in 1882, but Nietzsche was being too much the philosopher and too little the man of action. God didn't actually die until September 2005, as I wanted to explain. For two years I wrote and wrote Stealing Heaven From God , and soon had a one thousand page book in four parts. But for some reason I was uneasy about the project precisely because of the length of pages it had acquired. As a playwright, I'm used to brevity. In the end, I decided to leave Stealing Heaven From God unfinished and abandon it. In the last analysis, I didn't feel it was precise enough. Angels, Cleopatra And Psychosis , and the follow up Leonardo, Romancia And Ra are the result of this decision, both books being highly edited highlights of the best chapters in Stealing Heaven From God . Over one thousand pages has become a published total in two books of only two hundred and forty.

In Angels, Cleopatra And Psychosis I am sometimes on psychiatric wards, but in Leonardo, Romancia And Ra I am always free, be it in York, Paris or Macclesfield. Both books are supernatural adventure stories, detaiing my encounters with the spirits of dead artists, my meeting with a female angel, the fallen angel Lucifer, and lastly with the ancient Sun God Ra Himself. Angels, Cleopatra And Psychosis describes the death of God. Leonardo, Romancia And Ra relates a new religion beyond worship, created in October 2004 as I talk to Ra in my own lounge. I stand by every word of both books. Please buy them, and please write an Amazon review!

Lastly, it's a commonplace to say that mental health publishing is a big publishers turn off, but I don't see why. After all, one in four people in the UK suffer a mental health problem at some point in their lives, so in fact, mental health books should be fairly popular. 25% of the population is a big market which ever way you look at it, but I suppose it's about how such books are written and presented. And there's definitely room for improvement on both counts…