Personality Disorder

Heather Castillo is the Advocacy Service Manager for Colchester Mind. She has worked for twelve years in Mind Organisations in North East Essex, developing Advocacy for adults with mental health problems.

• 1. Dreaming of a better way. 2. A Historical perspective. 3. The disliked patient. 4. Personality development. 5. Complex post traumatic syndrome. 6. Treatability. 7. Is suffering an illness? 8. Getting our act together. 9. The task. 10. Demographics and themes. 11. What personality disorder means to us. 12. Experiences. 13. The moral career of the client. 14. The diagnostic straightjacket. 15. Spreading the word. 16. New beginnings. Index.

This is a good book about personality disorder, which is also a great book about advocacy... Vividly is to convey, in people's own words, what it feels like to have the label `personality disorder', and points us towards a new understanding of both this term and other diagnoses, which includes the personal experience, as well as the theoretical framework of `the helper'... At it's best advocacy has been a vehicle to help articulate the views of people generally not heard. This book is a perfect example of this, and in a time when advocacy is changing, we should cherish Castillo's book as example of a kind of advocacy that may be going out of fashion... Her book is an attempt to redress that failing, and despite the nightmarish descriptions, the overall impression we are left with is hopeful and, yes, emancipatory - partly because Castillo has succeeded in throwing some light into a corner of the world most of us find hard to look at.