Reblogged from Frank Prem:

The BFOR Blog Tour

Throughout August and into September 2019 the UK based Books for Older Readers (#BFOR) Group is having a blog tour, visiting the pages of some of its members and taking a peek at articles and book reviews, or extracts from work done by or suitable to bring to the attention of members.

The group comprises both readers and authors, and the BFOR web page can be found here, while the Facebook group is here. Check them out.

Today it is my turn to post an article that might be of interest, and I have chosen to provide an introduction for readers to my lifetime association with Psychiatry, and my forthcoming free-verse poetry collection – The New Asylum – a memoir of psychiatry. For me, this story includes aspects of inheritance, and parent child relationships, each leading to a lifelong commitment to and association with the field.

Psychiatry and me

My parents and the mental asylum

My personal association with psychiatry goes back over 60 years, now, and spans almost as long as I’ve been alive.

It began around 1958 when my parents and my paternal grandparents arrived in Australia as new immigrants seeking a second chance in life, away from communist ruled Croatia (then part of Yugoslavia). On arrival in Australia, they were sponsored to live and work in a small rural town in north east Victoria, called Beechworth, and my mother quickly obtained work in the local Mayday Hills Mental Asylum, as those institutions were then termed.

Continue reading at Frank Prem