In his new “autobiography, of sorts,” John Strauss, MD, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, asks the difficult question: How do you truly understand what it means to be a person, or a person struggling with mental illness?
Strauss combines his many years of medical training and practice with personal life experiences to help readers understand people and mental health as a human science. The book is called “To Understand a Person: An Autobiography of Sorts.”
“What it does is it allows other people who know me to think about their own lives,” said Strauss, 88, “A lot of it is a history of my life. It was all stuff I knew, but putting it down together, it was like a whole new world.”
Strauss enjoyed a long career at Yale conducting research and teaching. Although technically retired he still attends seminars and said he “only does stuff that I want to do” like leading and participating in writing groups, “people working with people who have mental illnesses” who want to write about that experience.
His clinical work involved treating people with severe mental illness, including schizophrenia, and he became an expert on diagnosis, contributing to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and to understanding the course and outcome of people with mental illnesses.
Every step of this project was more interesting than I could have imagined and to my surprise I kept learning new things about my life and about how to think about people’s lives more generally.
John Strauss, MD, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry
His research revealed that people with schizophrenia could see improvement, and he has written about how people with severe psychiatric disorders experience their lives and act to contribute to the processes of their improvement.
He discusses his professional work in the book, but also shares personal experiences, including how he hitchhiked one summer 9,000 miles across the United States, and extensive time spent in Europe, especially in Paris and in Geneva studying with Jean Piaget. Growing up, he spent time on an island that his grandfather owned in Canada and shared what it was like to canoe late at night.
Strauss said the book project took a couple years to complete. He said he received tremendous support from friends and his son and daughter, who are 58 and 54, respectively.
“My son suggested that I write it as if I were talking to someone,” he said. “Every step of this project was more interesting than I could have imagined and to my surprise I kept learning new things about my life and about how to think about people’s lives more generally.”