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Book review
Title: Voices in my Head
Author: Lara May
Year of Publication: 2025
For centuries, writers have explored the human conditions in their works, blending emotional seesaws and the irregular for our reading delight. These works offer us a mirror to see our reflections and give us a compass to navigate through the hurdles of life. Mental illness is one of the most harrowing experiences anybody can face. Momentarily, it transports a patient to a nebulous geography, where actions and speeches do not follow a universal rhythm. Yet it isn’t the end of the world for the mentally ill.
Literature on mental health provides vital windows into human psychology and destigmatising. Conditions like trauma, depression, schizophrenia, and others, have been profoundly explored by writers. These narratives attempt to foster empathy and understanding about the patients and their conditions. From gripping fiction to personal memoirs, the realities of living with a mental health condition are unraveling in books, and we cannlt but bear with the man or woman with those lunatic rattles on the street.
The famous author, Sylvia Plath, gave us Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical classic that explores the harrowing descent into depression and societal pressures of the 1950s. You may have heard about The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, a fantasy-fiction story that dwells on a woman in despair, who explores the infinite lives she could have lived. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman is another literary work on mental health, uncovering buried trauma, loneliness, and the path to human connection. Also, worthy of mention is Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason: A moving and darkly funny novel that unravels an unexplained, lifelong mental health condition.
Enter Voices in my Head, a book by Lara May, seeking to demystify the stigma associated with mental health. It distills the life of a character suffering from paranoia schizophrenia, which has driven her to believe she is being monitored through her phones, a chip planted in her head, and on the road as she commutes the length and breadth of the city, suggestive of enemies at large on a mission to jeopardise her existence. The book takes us on a voyage into the disequilibrium in the brain chemistry of the narrator and the rally that brought her back on her feet.
The opening pages of the novel situate the setting of the book – Neuropsychiatric
Hospital, Aro. “My bed was next to the nurse’s station, and I could see the nurses’ station from the large window…. I could see that my things were arranged and a suitcase was underneath my bed,” says the narrator, Omolara Jaiyeola. Here, the work begins in the middle of things as she explains how she finds herself in the hospital following her worsening mental condition.
The narrator is pissed off with the regular medication in the hospital. As far as she is concerned, there is nothing wrong with her. Little wonder, she attempts to escape, but isn’t successful. While responding to questions from the hospital authorities on her condition, he says she has been hearing voices and believes her phone has been hacked — “they are using it to monitor every movement,” she claims. At a point, the narrator blames her ordeal on her neighbour living in E402, the ex- girlfriend of her ex-husband, who hacked the phone to monitor her. She reports this to the police.
This book reminds us about the important role played by family and friends in the life of a mental health patient. Her family and friends stood by the narrator all through her predicament by encouraging her to go to the hospital and providing for her. Though the first two hospitals didn’t actually produce the right results, Aro did it for her with the expertise of the medical officers and caregivers attending to her.
At the end of the narrative, the narrator, who arrived at the hospital with worries, left with elaborate smiles. Her delusions have disappeared and she has gained weight rapidly. Without this successful medical intervention, Jaiyeola would have lived with the morbid fear of the unknown and the ambiguous belief that an enemy was after her life. A book like Voices in my Head ought to be a staple on every reading table. Perhaps uou may know somebody suffering from the same condition. Yes, we shouldn’t stigmatise people living with mental disorders. It is our duty to care for them and take them to the road that leads to paradise.
“As I got better, I had a new lease of life…,” this comforting remark by the narrator at the end of the narrative is quite instructive.
Pagination: 55
