Breakdown: A Personal Crisis and a Personal Dilemma

by Stuart Sutherland

This acclaimed account by author of the bestselling author of Irrationailty of his own manic depression remains unique in its honesty and perception. As an eminent psychologist who suffered a severe mental breaskdown. Stuart Sutherland was ideally placed to provide an original and insightful description of his illness and often bizarre consequences. In the second part of Breakdown, Sutherland describes and assesses the various forms of therapy and drug treatments available to sufferers of manic depression and analyses the origins of mental illness. Essentail reading for anyone affected by or interested in mental illness.

Genres: Psychology

308 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

British Psychologist Norman Stuart Sutherland (26 March 1927 – 8 November 1998), always known professionally as Stuart Sutherland, was a British psychologist and writer.

Sutherland was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, before going to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology. He stayed at Oxford for his DPhil which he took in zoology under the supervision of J. Z. Young. He held a lecturing post at Oxford before moving in 1964 to the recently opened University of Sussex as the founding Professor and head of its Laboratory of Experimental Psychology; with the young colleagues he appointed, he rapidly built an international reputation for Sussex in this field.

Among psychologists, Sutherland is best known for his theoretical and empirical work in comparative psychology, particularly in relation to visual pattern recognition and discrimination learning. In the 1950s and 1960s he carried out numerous experiments on rats but also on other species such as octopus; the two-factor theory of discrimination learning that he developed with Nicholas Mackintosh was an important step in the rehabilitation of a cognitive approach to animal learning after the dominance of strict behaviourism in the first half of the twentieth century. He was also interested in human perception and cognition, and in 1992 he published Irrationality: The enemy within, a lay reader's guide to the psychology of cognitive biases and common failures of human judgement.

Among a wider public, Sutherland is most famous for his 1976 autobiography Breakdown, detailing his struggles with manic depression. A second edition of Breakdown was published in 1995. Stuart Sutherland died from a heart attack in November 1998.

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

What will you get from this book? You will gain a better appreciation for why people break down, but you will also, perhaps as I did, come to realise the tenuous grip that even the most educated and wise individuals - even experts in a field in which they find themselves victim - have on their mental state. Hopefully it will inform, from a first-person perspective, on how you should tackle such issues. On the other hand, do not read this book to learn about the formalism regarding clinical psychology - find a more modern book.

I read this book a while ago, but it is split into two parts:

1. The autobiographical account. This is the most candid account that I have ever read someone give of themselves. He is brutally and openly honest about the causes of his mental breakdown and he does not fill the reader with blind optimism. I will give no spoilers away. In my opinion, this is must-read material.

2. This is the part of the book in which Sutherland attempts to give a 'breakdown' (terrible pun - I don't deserve to live) of clinical psychology. It is very, very outdated and I do not recommend that any of it be read.

[Marcus Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book about psychiatry.

Sutherland was a psychiatrist who had a mental breakdown after he discovered his wife was having an affair with a colleague.
The first part deals with his own mental breakdown, and how he recovered. The second part deals with the options for recovery through traditional methods of psychiatry and evaluates their effectiveness. Rather iconoclastic book, but excellent, and long over-due.

[Thom Dunn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A 1976 memoir of depression and critique of the then standard practice of addressing such, "A leading psychologiest's story of his own mental and emotional collapse, and his search for help among the various therapies." {I seem already to have read this to smithereens, glued gathering cracked into two pieces. No binding.

[chill · Rating 4 out of 5]

More like a 3.5. But I enjoyed many of the paragraphs.