Inspired by Professor Tanya Byron’s years of training as a clinical psychologist, The Skeleton Cupboard offers extraordinary stories of ordinary people struggling to cope with the challenges of life.
Through them we attempt to understand the line between sanity and insanity - and come to realize that it does not exist. The most fragile, vulnerable people can still offer strength and wisdom. Those hardened by cruel circumstance can show real kindness and compassion towards those who treat them. And those of us who outwardly appear untroubled can mask an inner life of turmoil.
With startling poignancy and powerful, affecting storytelling, this book is a testimony to anyone who has strived to make the journey from chaos to clarity.
A gruesome family death set Tanya Byron on the path to becoming a child psychologist, a journey she describes in her new book.
How did you get here? Why now? What is your story and how would you like it to continue? For 25 years, psychologist Prof Tanya Byron has been asking these questions of her patients to help them ‘make that journey from chaos to clarity’.
Last year, while writing The Skeleton Cupboard, a memoir of her early years training as a clinical psychologist from 1989 to 1992, she asked herself: ‘I first became fascinated by the frontal lobes of the human brain when I saw my grandmother’s sprayed across the skirting board of the front room of her dark and cluttered house. I was 15,’ she writes in the introduction to her book.
