Review
Voices in the Rain is very engrossing and a real page turner. Ms. Murphy addresses well issues of great interest and importance, especially the impact of psychiatric ailments, the potential for meaningful recovery, and the pervasiveness of stigma through the details of a personal story. The dialogue and details of different periods of her own history engage the reader with the larger themes through an extremely interesting personal narrative. Ms. Murphy has done a terrific job in developing a book with appeal to and relevance for a potentially wide range of readers and a wide audience, i.e., readers who have experienced psychiatric ailments first hand, family members, but also mental health clinicians and trainees, as well as members of the wider public interested in personal stories and in understanding more about the experience of psychiatric disorders. Ms. Murphy has done a great job in connecting the magnetism of a personal story to multiple larger themes. --James E. Sabin, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University
Voices in the Rain is the moving and thoroughly believable story of the hard-scrabble recovery from serious mental illness of a young woman in Iowa. Like no other memoir, Marcia Murphy lets the reader walk for more than a mile in the shoes of someone living every day with schizophrenia. Murphy shows how intellectual curiosity, religious faith and spirituality, along with psychiatrists, family and friends, and especially other people who are learning to live with mental illness make up the patches in the fragile quilt of recovery. --Robert Rosenheck, MD, Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Public Health, Yale School of Medicine, Yale University
Marcia Murphy's Voices in the Rain is an intriguing, troubling, and inspirational personal chronicle of the author's experiences as a cult member, living with schizophrenia, and finding hope and healing through her personal religious faith. Ms. Murphy's first-hand account of Reverend Moon's Unification Church recruitment, brainwashing, and of being considered worthless to the group when she developed psychotic symptoms, was both riveting and disturbing. She provides a powerful depiction of what it is like to live with schizophrenia, experience auditory hallucinations and delusions, and how the illness devastated all aspects of her life. Her insights into the biopsychosocial and spiritual aspects of schizophrenia are enlightening and would be informative for mental health workers, families of persons with severe mental illnesses, clergy, and anyone with an interest in mental illness. Ms. Murphy concludes her fascinating memoir by relating how, through years of searching, she found religious meaning in the psychotic experiences and how this led to her healing and recovery. --Del D. Miller, Pharm.D. MD, Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine, University of Iowa
About the Author
Marcia A. Murphy has published articles, essays, and works of creative nonfiction in professional psychiatric journals, four anthologies, the University of Iowa website, the Daily Palette, and the Daily Iowan and Quad City Times newspapers. In her book-length memoir you will find the story of her life, experience with mental illness, and recovery which is also a polemic and an apologetic based on the problem of evil. Ms. Murphy has read her work on WSUI, the University of Iowa's radio station on the program Talk of Iowa, Live from the Java House. She has also read on live television. In combination with her writing Ms. Murphy is also a speaker.
