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Finding True North
Beneath the wide skies of Orkney Linda Gask recalls both her career as a consultant psychiatrist and her lifelong struggle with her own mental health. After the favelas of Brazil, the glittering cities of the Middle East, and the forests of Haida Gwai, will she find perspective, spiritual relief, and healing in the quietude of her new home? Her troubled past is never far away.
- GenresNonfiction
240 pages, Paperback
First published April 29, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 11, 2021
What a remarkable book this is, Gask shares with us a side of mental health that the average joe wouldn’t ever consider, the mental health of a psychiatrist. Gask has had a full career helping those many people who have needed somebody to be there, to listen and to see them and if her writing is anything to go by she must have been a great listener with a soothing voice. The book comes across as very honest, by listening to her patients she has learnt ways to come to terms with her own past trauma and depression and she shares with the reader the highs and lows of her route to where she is at this moment in her life.
I am one of those lucky people, I don’t suffer from any mental health issues and I feel very lucky to be where I am in life, a good life at home and somewhere at work to get away from the stresses of work, (a common with plenty of wildlife to help me unwind) without these stable parts of my life it is scary to think what I’d be like. I think I found “The True North” that Gask is hinting at in this book early on in my life. I do know of people who suffer from anxiety and depression and this book has really opened my eyes about what they are going through, I must admit that I have thought at times that it must be easier to deal with and that it would go away soon…this book has taught me I’ve gotta be way more patient and shown me ways I can be more helpful.
I think Gask has been very brave in writing this book as it is a harsh world out there full of people with a mean streak and zero cares for anybody but themselves, I think she has written a well balanced book, she hasn’t attacked anybody or any system, she points out faults and comes up with ways to improve things and she has raised awareness of things that are working. I’m not sure this is a book for those who suffer as they won’t get any help here, apart from realising they aren’t alone, this is a book for those who know of people who suffer from mental health problems, it is a way they can find ways they can help. Also don’t read this book if you are trying to avoid falling in love with The Orkneys, it is somewhere I’ve always wanted to go….one day I shall make it there.
Blog review: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2021...
I am one of those lucky people, I don’t suffer from any mental health issues and I feel very lucky to be where I am in life, a good life at home and somewhere at work to get away from the stresses of work, (a common with plenty of wildlife to help me unwind) without these stable parts of my life it is scary to think what I’d be like. I think I found “The True North” that Gask is hinting at in this book early on in my life. I do know of people who suffer from anxiety and depression and this book has really opened my eyes about what they are going through, I must admit that I have thought at times that it must be easier to deal with and that it would go away soon…this book has taught me I’ve gotta be way more patient and shown me ways I can be more helpful.
I think Gask has been very brave in writing this book as it is a harsh world out there full of people with a mean streak and zero cares for anybody but themselves, I think she has written a well balanced book, she hasn’t attacked anybody or any system, she points out faults and comes up with ways to improve things and she has raised awareness of things that are working. I’m not sure this is a book for those who suffer as they won’t get any help here, apart from realising they aren’t alone, this is a book for those who know of people who suffer from mental health problems, it is a way they can find ways they can help. Also don’t read this book if you are trying to avoid falling in love with The Orkneys, it is somewhere I’ve always wanted to go….one day I shall make it there.
Blog review: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2021...
May 14, 2021
Linda Gask has had an interesting and varied life. She retired from being a consultant psychiatrist in the National Health Service and an academic at the University of Manchester a number of years ago. She is now Emerita Professor of Primary Care Psychiatry at the University of Manchester. In the past, she has advised the World Health Organisation and was awarded the President’s Medal by the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 2017.
To work at that high level you would expect someone who is driven and level headed, but she has suffered from anxiety and depression throughout her life. After she retired she decided to make her home in Orkney, her husband still had commitments down south so they would be enduring separate lives for the foreseeable future. She moves in slowly bringing items from their home in Yorkshire all the while wondering how this abode will cope with the relentless weather that sweeps in all year round. As they talk over Skype, John sees that she is relapsing into another period of mental illness.
It is a challenging time for both of them, John’s mother is admitted to a care home and he still wants to stay near her so they only have a certain amount of time together before he has to head back to Yorkshire. They have always wanted to live in Scotland, but circumstances mean that this isn’t possible at the moment and that isn’t helping with her anxiety. Slowly things begin to change though and a combination of medicines and hope help lift her from her blackest period.
This is a very personal memoir of a life spent helping others with their mental health issues whilst at the same time suffering from her own mental health issues. It did give her an insight into what the patients in her care were suffering from and almost certainly meant that she was in a better place to be able to help them recover. I had hoped for more of the place that she has chosen to live with her husband, Orkney. It is there in the book, but only as a landscape glimpsed occasionally in the narrative, but she does bring its bleak beauty alive in her prose.
To work at that high level you would expect someone who is driven and level headed, but she has suffered from anxiety and depression throughout her life. After she retired she decided to make her home in Orkney, her husband still had commitments down south so they would be enduring separate lives for the foreseeable future. She moves in slowly bringing items from their home in Yorkshire all the while wondering how this abode will cope with the relentless weather that sweeps in all year round. As they talk over Skype, John sees that she is relapsing into another period of mental illness.
It is a challenging time for both of them, John’s mother is admitted to a care home and he still wants to stay near her so they only have a certain amount of time together before he has to head back to Yorkshire. They have always wanted to live in Scotland, but circumstances mean that this isn’t possible at the moment and that isn’t helping with her anxiety. Slowly things begin to change though and a combination of medicines and hope help lift her from her blackest period.
This is a very personal memoir of a life spent helping others with their mental health issues whilst at the same time suffering from her own mental health issues. It did give her an insight into what the patients in her care were suffering from and almost certainly meant that she was in a better place to be able to help them recover. I had hoped for more of the place that she has chosen to live with her husband, Orkney. It is there in the book, but only as a landscape glimpsed occasionally in the narrative, but she does bring its bleak beauty alive in her prose.
June 8, 2021
This is a book that goes beneath the surface of love, work, and mental illness. It is the portrait of a marriage, through the two-sided lens of longterm depression and a career caring for others who struggle with mental health conditions.
This memoir takes us on a journey beginning in the seaside town where she grew up and ending at ‘The Wee Hoose’, her cottage in Orkney. As with depression, life does not follow a predictable and tidy narrative arc. Reading this book feels as though we are looking through a box of photographs, some old, torn, and faded, some vivid and present. Her writing is sharply observed and intimate, and its structure reflects the associative style in which memory works, zigzagging from the window where she spots a hare in the garden to a flinching image of her parents’ harsh words and hands. The author allows us to eavesdrop as her husband’s efforts to lure her out for a walk are met by resistance as she needs to finish writing down her reflections before they vanish.
Woven through these images is the profound and recurrent depression Gask has suffered for most of her life. Readers who understand depression will recognise her descriptions of intractable hopelessness. ‘Inside I was barely holding myself together. The problem is that when I’m going down, I don’t recognise it until quite late’... ‘The invisible feelings of guilt and despair and a terrible sensation of being beyond feeling, that the joy had gone out of being alive and there was no point to anything’. In recent years, two major anchors that have saved her have been her location and her husband’s love. Her writing provides a life raft. ‘True North’ reflects both Gask’s external and internal world, and the delicate balancing act that helps her achieve at least some sense of equilibrium.
As a mental health professional suffering from mental illness (which she introduces us to in her first book, The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir of Depression) Linda Gask has had a remarkable career in spite of two further obstacles: her own parents’ discouragement of ambition and being a woman working in an NHS macho management culture that she describes as, at times, a key factor in a person becoming depressed in the first place, but which also creates a sense of shame and stigmatisation even within mental health services.
She questions the popular myths and expectations of recovery that we see in some corners of psychology. ‘To take the treatment and get better, or not take it and just pull yourself together and be fine. For some of us, it is more complicated. Our lives do not return to ‘normal’. Her book demonstrates with sharp clarity that severe depression is beyond the shallows of ‘resilience’, ‘normal distress’, or positive psychology. Mental illness is messy. Its undertow is hidden. Your colleague with the friendly wave may in fact be drowning.
It is said that finishing a good book makes you feel closer to the person. Gask’s willingness to write with such candour, courage, vulnerability, and strength allows the reader to feel that they are sitting beside her as she writes. We are left eager to see the next part of the story.
This memoir takes us on a journey beginning in the seaside town where she grew up and ending at ‘The Wee Hoose’, her cottage in Orkney. As with depression, life does not follow a predictable and tidy narrative arc. Reading this book feels as though we are looking through a box of photographs, some old, torn, and faded, some vivid and present. Her writing is sharply observed and intimate, and its structure reflects the associative style in which memory works, zigzagging from the window where she spots a hare in the garden to a flinching image of her parents’ harsh words and hands. The author allows us to eavesdrop as her husband’s efforts to lure her out for a walk are met by resistance as she needs to finish writing down her reflections before they vanish.
Woven through these images is the profound and recurrent depression Gask has suffered for most of her life. Readers who understand depression will recognise her descriptions of intractable hopelessness. ‘Inside I was barely holding myself together. The problem is that when I’m going down, I don’t recognise it until quite late’... ‘The invisible feelings of guilt and despair and a terrible sensation of being beyond feeling, that the joy had gone out of being alive and there was no point to anything’. In recent years, two major anchors that have saved her have been her location and her husband’s love. Her writing provides a life raft. ‘True North’ reflects both Gask’s external and internal world, and the delicate balancing act that helps her achieve at least some sense of equilibrium.
As a mental health professional suffering from mental illness (which she introduces us to in her first book, The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir of Depression) Linda Gask has had a remarkable career in spite of two further obstacles: her own parents’ discouragement of ambition and being a woman working in an NHS macho management culture that she describes as, at times, a key factor in a person becoming depressed in the first place, but which also creates a sense of shame and stigmatisation even within mental health services.
She questions the popular myths and expectations of recovery that we see in some corners of psychology. ‘To take the treatment and get better, or not take it and just pull yourself together and be fine. For some of us, it is more complicated. Our lives do not return to ‘normal’. Her book demonstrates with sharp clarity that severe depression is beyond the shallows of ‘resilience’, ‘normal distress’, or positive psychology. Mental illness is messy. Its undertow is hidden. Your colleague with the friendly wave may in fact be drowning.
It is said that finishing a good book makes you feel closer to the person. Gask’s willingness to write with such candour, courage, vulnerability, and strength allows the reader to feel that they are sitting beside her as she writes. We are left eager to see the next part of the story.
August 22, 2021
There are few people in the UK as ‘expert’ in mental health as this author, a psychiatrist with decades of experience and apparently her fingers in many pies! However, it is her own mental health that comes under scrutiny in this biography, wherein the author considers her path, her past and as the subtitle suggests, the healing power of place.
The good: Lockdown living brought into sharp focus (for me) all that is wonderful about having access to the Scottish countryside. For the author, her love for Orkney (where she now resides) and her descriptions of her life there were beautifully and poignantly written, as she makes sense of what makes it her spiritual home.
The bad: The book can feel repetitive at times. I suspect this was intentional; mental health ebbs and flows. Sometimes that movement can be linked to something tangential and sometimes, very frustratingly, it cannot. The author’s frustration at her inability to master her mental health comes across, and is an important point to bear in mind both for those that suffer from mental ill health, and those that support it. However beautifully written, the same issue is being reported numerous times, and can become monotonous.
Summary: The irony of the mental health expert that cannot escape her own mental ill health is not lost on the author; there are excellent insights throughout. If this appeals, read the book. I work in the field and struggle with my own frustrations at the systems in place to address it, and unfortunately just found the book too close to home for entertainment.
The good: Lockdown living brought into sharp focus (for me) all that is wonderful about having access to the Scottish countryside. For the author, her love for Orkney (where she now resides) and her descriptions of her life there were beautifully and poignantly written, as she makes sense of what makes it her spiritual home.
The bad: The book can feel repetitive at times. I suspect this was intentional; mental health ebbs and flows. Sometimes that movement can be linked to something tangential and sometimes, very frustratingly, it cannot. The author’s frustration at her inability to master her mental health comes across, and is an important point to bear in mind both for those that suffer from mental ill health, and those that support it. However beautifully written, the same issue is being reported numerous times, and can become monotonous.
Summary: The irony of the mental health expert that cannot escape her own mental ill health is not lost on the author; there are excellent insights throughout. If this appeals, read the book. I work in the field and struggle with my own frustrations at the systems in place to address it, and unfortunately just found the book too close to home for entertainment.
July 12, 2021
A wonderfully moving and insightful read. Gask balances her own story against those of her patients and the experience of her family too, all against a background of the wildness of Orkney. Woven gently in were debates/comments about crisis care, funding of services and antidepressant prescribing. Also throughout the book were threads and updates on minor ‘storylines’ such as John’s difficulties caring for his mother, the debate about moving permanently to Orkney, Linda’s relationships with neighbours, and Katie the cat. I enjoyed this wandering through various aspects of the author’s life and unlike some other memoirs I have read, it still felt structured and as if the reflection and healing were progressing and deepening throughout.
This felt like a restorative read, but lots to take away for both my personal and professional life. I will certainly be recommending this to colleagues.
This felt like a restorative read, but lots to take away for both my personal and professional life. I will certainly be recommending this to colleagues.
February 14, 2022
This book really resonated with me. I can identify with her battle with depression whilst still maintaining a successful career in the field of Psychiatry.
You can give such strong support and advice to others yet struggle to deal with your own demons. As an introvert I also understood her need to escape from the pressures of work and people to decompress and process those emotions. An excellent read.
You can give such strong support and advice to others yet struggle to deal with your own demons. As an introvert I also understood her need to escape from the pressures of work and people to decompress and process those emotions. An excellent read.
read-2021
April 5, 2021This I found unreadable and not even worth a single star rating.
Bought for the Orkney location - to which is given little more than grudging lip service - it consists, as far as I was able to ascertain by skipping ahead, of one woman complaining and commenting, non-stop and repetitively, about each and every little thing she finds upsetting. Without respite.
Bought for the Orkney location - to which is given little more than grudging lip service - it consists, as far as I was able to ascertain by skipping ahead, of one woman complaining and commenting, non-stop and repetitively, about each and every little thing she finds upsetting. Without respite.
August 21, 2023
I liked this book partly because of its location, partly because of the way the author describes and discusses her life and marriage and partly because of the deep honesty about and focus upon mental health. It was interesting to read her thoughts on medication. A good read for anyone interested in mental health.
June 30, 2024
One of the best stories I have read on mental health and nature providing healing. A good memoir, which I got a lot from.
February 9, 2022
The backbone of the book is the mental health that we aren't likely to consider, that of a psychiatrist, which the author is. She has liven with her depression for some considerable time. The book doesn't really offer solutions, but she points out difficulties and suggests some ways to improve things for folk. It is a well balanced book, which in passing produces a good manifesto for moving to the Orkneys.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews