Piece of Mind - David Mark

As a fiction writer of some very dark crime novels (the 7th DS McAvoy novel Scorched Earth is one of the bleakest I have read), you wouldn't think that David Mark is the ideal person to write a self-help book with an optimistic outlook on dealing with mental illness. But that's ok because Piece of Mind is not a self-help book but it is nonetheless a book that will certainly help some people (many people if it gets out there) gain a better understanding what a person with mental health issues is going through; whether you are dealing with it yourself or whether you live with someone suffering from depression, bi-polar, borderline personality disorder BPD, OCD or ADHD. That's more people than you might imagine and you wouldn't always know, so Piece of Mind can help you recognise the signs.

I mean, you wouldn't think a talented bestselling and seemingly self-confident author like David Mark would suffer from low self-esteem,. depression or indeed such debilitating mental health issues that he has been driven to the edge of suicide. Even his success as an author - a career that was born out of an abandoned suicide attempt - has brought little of reassurance but rather only left him even more insecure and lacking in self-worth. Piece of Mind takes the form of a memoir of David Mark's own struggles with his disorders, how they manifested at a young age, how they have affected his life and relationships, and the ways that he has tried to overcome them, or perhaps rather learned how to live with them. Living being the operative word where the alternative has definitely been seriously contemplated.

But yeah, when you reconsider his work in the light of this memoir, it explains a lot of things about the characters in his books; not just the deranged psychopaths and tortured souls, but also the ordinary tormented people filled with love and fearing loss. His characters are fully human in all their flawed beauty, brilliantly observed, encapsulating not just how he sees people and the world, but how he would like them - and himself - to be.

Much as I would love to see Mark provide some analysis, insight and self-criticism of his impressive body of work, that's not what Piece of Mind is really about. You don't even need to be familiar with his back catalogue to really appreciate the brutally frank openness and honesty with which he describes his own life, failings and problems. But it's not just self-indulgent soul searching either, the book offering observations and advice along the way that can be blunt and humorous, but also deeply insightful in a way that will help people understand what we are talking about when we talk about mental illness. And it might just save some lives.