Words of My Father, a story co-written by a father and his son, is a fascinating book because it brings its two narrators into dialogue, one of whom is… deceased. This characteristic alone could make it a unique work. The authors take us through an epic tale of a man struggling with bipolar disorder who goes through the troubled and effervescent socio-political period of social movements in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States. For my part, it is this facet of the story that particularly resonated with me.  

Indeed, I made a bridge with my own experience of illness. I myself experienced history by having made a trip to Washington in 2013 in full hypomania. I was going there to attend Barack Obama’s speech marking 50 years of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. My inner experience and the events it related to were at that moment in total fusion.  

Since the genre of testimonies of people who have experienced a roller coaster because of their mental disorder has dozens of titles, it is difficult to write something that stands out from the crowd. To achieve this, the authors manage to go beyond the story alone by placing it in an era, which acts as a lever to begin a larger-scale reflection on the intertwining between people experiencing illness and their environments. In short, it is perhaps the best way to give a face to mental health and illness to probe the complexity of an existence to make it a tool for destigmatization. Illness and mental health do not exist outside of reality. As such, the book reflects a great case study to understand the “psycho-social” of the “bio-psycho-social” model. 

By Charles-Albert Morin