Buster's fired a wobbler - a week in a psychiatric hospital

Contents

By Geoff Burrell
Published by Penguin, 1989
Paperback 178 pages, great reading copy

In the week before Christmas, Buster and his fellow nurses are on supply duty at their mental hospital.

Clinging to the shreds of his ideals, Buster moves from acute to chronic to rehabilitation wards, out into the community care programme and back behind shuttered windowns again; from manic-depressives like Emma Jane, an inmate where she was once a doctor, to senile incontinents like Tommy, with his inexhaustable reportoire of dirty songs and linen; from psychotic Sidney to schizophrenic Brian; from dedicated staff to those hardly saner than their charges, from victims to the merely defeated.

Buster's fired a wobbler, filled with memorable charaters, desperate humour, patient despair and the vivid warmth of a brief success, is a brilliant factional account of this world. 

But more than that, it is also a damning indictment of the shame that is the British mental hospital