The Ghost Garden: A Book Review

Schizophrenics are the least represented people on the planet, with the possible exception of lepers.  Susan Doherty’s path-breaking book The Ghost Garden: Inside the Lives of Schizophrenia’s Feared and Forgotten (2019) is an excellent and compelling non-fictional narrative of the life of Caroline Evans (a pseudonym) as she battled chronic relapses of psychosis and delusional thinking throughout her adult years.  The story begins with a horrendous forensic episode, at the age of forty, when the system failed her, and how two of her sisters (of nine siblings) do the emotional heavy lifting essential to recovery, as Caroline eventually comes to terms with the debilitating disease and learns to love herself again.   Interspersed throughout the main narrative are vignettes of other individuals – each trying to cope with schizophrenia in their own way – whom Susan Doherty befriends while volunteering at the wards of Montreal’s Douglas Institute.

While most reviews of The Ghost Garden are glowing, Anne Thériault’s comments in Quill & Quire are unjustifiably dismissive “as passing along second- or third-hand information”.  Centred on herself, Thériault writes: “many people living with mental illness write clearly and compellingly about their experiences,” while ignoring the fact that schizophrenics tend not to publish.  Schizophrenics either lack the motivation or are incapable of expressing themselves clearly in written form, with some exceptions.  Even Caroline, now in her sixties, owing to cognitive impairment following repeat psychoses, is unable to read her gift copy of The Ghost Garden.  The reviewer for Quill & Quire underestimates the totalizing severity of the schizophrenic condition, which makes The Ghost Garden all the more valuable to the general public, as it opens up eyes and is full of empathy.

The Ghost Garden sustains itself throughout by means of personal stories and gritty detail, but the concluding chapter (“Sixty Thoughts”) comes across as anti-climactic, and perhaps is less informative for those already familiar with the problems associated with schizophrenia.  Still, there are gems, for example the line: “Suffering is universal, a natural and essential aspect of the human experience.  Without suffering there is no benchmark for joy.”[1]  Elsewhere Doherty writes: “I have not yet met a person with schizophrenia who has managed to quit smoking” (while this author knows those who are non-smokers), which goes to suggest the degree to which her friends are seriously and chronically ill.[2]  Doherty leaves the reader with three central thoughts: schizophrenics (as do we all) need purpose, communication, and love. She expresses the latter again admirably well: “To love and be loved is an irreducible need.  Without it we ache, we hurt others, we fall ill.  Loving another person means we belong.”[3] The Ghost Garden is a book to be treasured, and every stage in Caroline’s life – as well as in Doherty’s other friends – is something from which we can all learn.

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[1] Susan Doherty, The Ghost Garden: Inside the Lives of Schizophrenia’s Feared and Forgotten (Toronto: Penguin Random House, 2019), p. 330.

[2] Ibid., p. 189.

[3] Ibid., p. 178.