ABSTRACT
The above story is one which confronts us with a number of important questions and many of the issues which we hope to explore in this book. What are we to make of this woman’s experience? Is she mad? Does she have a mental illness? Does she need help? What kind of help? We might also ask about her children. Are they safe? Is she safe? We might also wonder what she herself makes of her difficulties seeing as she is clearly troubled by them. Some of these questions are rather academic at this point in time, given that the events took place in the 1960s, and the woman and her now grown-up children are safe and well. She no longer has experiences of such intensity, which would
cause us to have concerns about her, or anybody else’s safety. She has never received any input from mental health services. However, although these events happened quite some time in the past, we can still fruitfully consider the question of what we are to make of this woman’s story. While her story is, of course, unique in its details, it also has elements which it shares with other people’s experiences and, as such, the question of what we make of these stories has ongoing relevance.
