Walking to Africa

Walking to Africa is an intensely felt narrative collection portraying a mother's experience of coming to terms with a new and frightening world of mental health care, diagnosis and treatment - for her daughter. Jessica Le Bas describes numerous visits to doctors, treatments that don't work and people who suddenly have answers - or poignant histories of their own to tell. At the heart of the book ('nothing else is working working nothing else is is is is') is a heart-rending set of poems about electroconvulsive therapy. Ultimately, however, Le Bas ushers in understanding: mental illness may have no definitive cure, but there are ways of living with it.