A Story of Unravelling Minds

Let Me Not Be Mad

A non-fiction literary psycho-thriller about a clinical neuropsychologist’s descent into madness with an ingenious and shocking twist

Exhilarating ... dazzling ... a miraculous feat

A mental-health memoir like no other … a genre-defying wake-up call of a book … compelling … clever humane … holding back a sly twist for the end

Let Me Not be Mad is stunning: clever, troubling, restless, honest, dishonest; one of the best portraits of madness and clinical practice I’ve read. I read it in two sittings. Extraordinary

A perfectly extraordinary – not to mention extraordinarily perfect – tense Hitchcockian psychodrama. I have rarely read a more haunting and enthralling account of a descent into madness. An important, profound and fascinating book

Imagine a gonzo Oliver Sacks communing with Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose, R.D. Laing and the spirit of Kafka’s 'The Country Doctor', and you still won’t quite have the flavour of this wild and strikingly original book

Brilliant and alarming, written with cunning and self-lacerating honesty. The doctor is sick, but his intelligence, his scope of reference, his damaged sagacity could save us all

Blackly comic, warmly compassionate, a unique take on the human mind offering uncomfortable universal truths

A treasure of a book. Intricately woven and deeply intimate, it reveals things that astonish, surprise and improve us

A truly astonishing journey into and out of the mind. Not content to pin you down with the intense intimacy of his storytelling Benjamin dramatises some of the most profound and intractable issues in neuroscience and psychiatry. I’ve never read anything like it

Like a meeting of Oliver Sacks and Hunter S Thompson … this is not a simple narrative of striking cases written by a far-seeing practitioner. It’s a turbo-charged race

At first I thought this an exceptionally well written book in the genre of medical story telling. The more I read the more I realised it’s an exceptional book in a genre all of its own. Insightful, wonderfully well observed and beautifully written

Suzanne O'Sullivan, author of It's All in Your Head

A slow-burn belter of a book ... terrific ... so finely described, the result has the terse force of a classic short story

Strange, claustrophobic, haunting … a dizzying whirlpool

Along the way the anonymised author, AK Benjamin, offers funny and unsettling insights into the vagaries of the relationship between clinicians and patients

A K Benjamin is a Clinical Neuropsychologist, specialising in diagnostics and acute rehab. Previously he was a screenwriter, spent two years as a contemplative monk and has worked at a number of NGOs, with homeless addicts, with gangs and with children with acquired and congenital neurological conditions. He no longer lives in the UK. A K Benjamin is not his real name.

Let Me Not Be Mad is an immersive, virtuosic and provocative investigation of madness, love and self-destruction that defies categorisation. 
 
'Exhilarating ... dazzling ... a miraculous feat' Guardian 
 
'I have rarely read a more haunting and enthralling account of a descent into madness' Stephen Fry 
 
A consulting room with two people in it. One of them is talking, the other is listening. Both of them need help. 
 
Throughout his life, A. K. Benjamin has found himself drawn to extreme behaviour: as a contemplative monk, an advocate for homeless addicts, a support-worker for gang members and for many years as a Clinical Neuropsychologist. 
 
His book begins as a series of clinical encounters with anonymised patients. But with each encounter, it becomes increasingly and disturbingly apparent that what we are reading is not really about the patients – it is, instead, about the author’s own fevered descent into mental illness as he confronts his traumatic past. 
 
'Stunning: clever, troubling, restless, honest, dishonest' Olivia Laing 
 
'Blackly comic, warmly compassionate, a unique take on the human mind' Stewart Lee

A K Benjamin

Part memoir, part case study, part work of fiction ... exhilarating ... this is really what he means by love: one mind truly knowing another ... rich ... claustrophobic ... Benjamin is at times a virtuosic writer ... an artful book, and there are moments of sublimity ... beautiful and moving

Benjamin writes beautifully and with exceptional insight, a tormented soul who knows the truth of the worst torments

A blindsiding dissection of the poetry of pain, dazzlingly scripted, with craft and integrity. Compulsive and shocking

With clinical precision, coupled with the sensibility of a poet, A K Benjamin lets the reader imagine the inter-twined world of a neuropsychologist and his patients

Caroline Elton, author of Also Human: The Inner Lives of Doctors

At first I thought this an exceptionally well written book in the genre of medical story telling. The more I read the more I realised it's an exceptional book in a genre all of its own. Insightful, wonderfully well observed and beautifully written

Suzanne O'Sullivan (on Let Me Not Be Mad)

A treasure of a book. Intricately woven and deeply intimate, it reveals things that astonish, surprise and improve us

A truly astonishing journey into and out of the mind. Not content to pin you down with the intense intimacy of his storytelling Benjamin dramatises some of the most profound and intractable issues in neuroscience and psychiatry. I've never read anything like it

Professor Mark Lythgoe, UCL (on Let Me Not Be Mad)

A mental-health memoir like no other ... a genre-defying wake-up call of a book ... compelling ... clever humane ... holding back a sly twist for the end

Like a meeting of Oliver Sacks and Hunter S Thompson ... this is not a simple narrative of striking cases written by a far-seeing practitioner. It's a turbo-charged race

My Adventures In Other Minds

What does it take to care for a stranger? Really care. 
 
The Case for Love is a reflection on a career treating patients with brain trauma - people whose thoughts and feelings are largely unknowable - and how and why those treatments failed. 
 
It is a reconstruction of three haunting cases in which the patients were tragically misunderstood - and an attempt through the power of the imagination to understand and make amends. 
 
It then describes the author's abandonment of his career and his tumultuous quest for healing and redemption. 
 
It is also a story of intimate relationships, pets, fatherhood and heartbreak, culminating in a moment of psychedelic transcendence and rebirth. 
 
It is about the overpowering need for connection - and how, increasingly, we are trapped in ourselves. 
 
It is a meditation on empathy and an act of atonement. 
 
It is a unique, hybrid work of clinical case study and pure invention that destroys the boundary between fact and fiction in order to bring us face-to-face with the shocking, liberating truth. 
 
__________ 
 
Praise for Let Me Not Be Mad 
 
'Imagine a gonzo Oliver Sacks communing with Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose, R.D. Laing and the spirit of Kafka's 'The Country Doctor', and you still won't quite have the flavour of this wild and strikingly original book' William Fiennes 
 
'Stunning: clever, troubling, restless, honest, dishonest; one of the best portraits of madness and clinical practice I've read' Olivia Laing 
 
'A perfectly extraordinary - not to mention extraordinarily perfect - tense Hitchcockian psychodrama. I have rarely read a more haunting and enthralling account of a descent into madness. An important, profound and fascinating book' Stephen Fry 
 
'Blackly comic, warmly compassionate, a unique take on the human mind offering uncomfortable universal truths' Stewart Lee 
 
'A slow-burn belter of a book ... terrific ... so finely described, the result has the terse force of a classic short story' Roddy Doyle 
 
'Exhilarating ... dazzling ... a miraculous feat' Guardian

The Case for Love

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A K Benjamin

Praise for The Case for Love

Part memoir, part case study, part work of fiction ... exhilarating ... this is really what he means by love: one mind truly knowing another ... rich ... claustrophobic ... Benjamin is at times a virtuosic writer .. ...

Benjamin writes beautifully and with exceptional insight, a tormented soul who knows the truth of the worst torments

A blindsiding dissection of the poetry of pain, dazzlingly scripted, with craft and integrity. Compulsive and shocking

Part memoir, part case study, part work of fiction ... exhilarating ... this is really what he means by love: one mind truly knowing another ... rich ... claustrophobic ... Benjamin is at times a virtuosic writer .. ...

Benjamin writes beautifully and with exceptional insight, a tormented soul who knows the truth of the worst torments

A blindsiding dissection of the poetry of pain, dazzlingly scripted, with craft and integrity. Compulsive and shocking

Part memoir, part case study, part work of fiction ... exhilarating ... this is really what he means by love: one mind truly knowing another ... rich ... claustrophobic ... Benjamin is at times a virtuosic writer .. ...

Benjamin writes beautifully and with exceptional insight, a tormented soul who knows the truth of the worst torments

A blindsiding dissection of the poetry of pain, dazzlingly scripted, with craft and integrity. Compulsive and shocking

Books by A K Benjamin

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