agness jacket a psychologists search for the meanings of madness
in a victorian era german asylum seamstress agnes richter painstakingly stitched a mysterious autobiographical text into every inch of the jacket she created from her institutional uniform . despite every attempt to silence them hundreds of other patients have managed to get their stories out at least in disguised form . today in a vibrant underground net work of psychiatric survivor groups all over the world patients work together to unravel the mysteries of madness and help one another re cover . optimistic courageous and surprising agness jacket takes us from a code cracking bunker during world war ii to the church basements and treatment centers where a whole new way of understanding the mind has begun to take form . br a vast gulf exists between the way medicine explains psychiatric illness and the experiences of those who suffer . hornsteins luminous work helps us bridge that gulf guiding us through the inner lives of those diagnosed with schizophrenia bipolar illness depression and paranoia and emerging with nothing less than a new model for understanding one another and ourselves . br