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Fighting the Corners edition by Patsy Gifford Health Fitness Dieting eBooks

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Description

My story is the personal account of my life through a middle-class background, achievements, tragedy, happiness and personal struggle with my father’s Victorian-type attitudes and beliefs, as well as living with the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia at the age of 22, and subsequent years of mental hospitals and treatments.

The assumptions of “being different” and the difficulties I encountered throughout my life have been put down to “being born” with schizophrenia. To many I was “an illness”, not an ordinary human being which I found difficult to cope with.

From adolescence to middle-age I have been isolated with the causes of my illness but with the help of some wonderful friends and a very caring and supportive Counsellor, I have now begun to unravel the mysteries of my mental illness, and this book I hope, will tell a truthful, meaningful and therapeutic account of my life.

My early years were happy with plenty of love and security. Brought up in Corstorphine, a residential area in Edinburgh, I was accustomed to comfort and kindness from my family – freedom and a good education at a private school.

My adolescence and teenage years were blighted by abuse (mental and sexual) and I was put on tranquillisers at the age of 14 or 15. My sister fell pregnant at age 17. She was 5 years older than me and my Dad totally rejected her for many, many years.

I became really ill at the age of 21 following a split with a boyfriend and my family and spent several months in a mental hospital in a catatonic state.

I married at 23, but spent more time in hospital during the next 20 years or so. I had two children during my marriage, Robin and Julie, and felt undermined by my mother-in-law for many years. In 1993 I left Rosslynlee Hospital, mostly due to medication and the support of Bill, my old lecturer and friend who wrote to me during my darkest days. My recovery was a long and exhausting process stretching over 15 years and I still continue to grow. …….. but that is a further story.

About the Author

Patricia was born in Edinburgh in 1948. She attended James Gillespies School for Girls. At the age of 15 she left school but later earned some recognition as a writer and poet. She achieved all grades with LAMDA in the speaking of verse and prose.

She worked as a bank clerk for eight years. In later life she passed the National Certificate in Community Care but her love of writing drove her on to studying newspaper journalism and she worked as a freelance journalist for some years. Pat has published three books of poetry.

She has 2 children by her only marriage. In her spare time she collects antiques and works as a volunteer in the church café in her home town. Coping with her illness was a big challenge to her but she was determined not to stop trying to achieve her goals as a writer wife and mother. Finally after nearly 40 years she discovered the real reasons for her illness and now lives happily on her own surrounded by friends and supporters of her “new self”.