Ross David Burke

Ross David Burke (born June 21, 1953 in Sydney , † November 27, 1985 ) was an Australian author, best known for his book "When the Music's Over - My Journey Into Schizophrenia".

With this work he documented his mental illness paranoid schizophrenia for ten years. Immediately after he had finished his book, he killed himself on November 27, 1985 with an overdose of unknown intoxicants . Burke's work is an intense and intimate portrait that he wrote in psychiatric hospitals, prisons and during his time as a functioning part of society. After his suicide, the neuropsychologist Richard Gates and the author Robin Hammond revised his diary "The Truth Effect" for the novel "When the Music's is over". This work is considered to be one of the first autobiographical portraits of a schizophrenic and was often taken up by other psychoanalysts such as Brendan Stone .

Works

• Burke, R. (1995): When the music falls silent. My journey into schizophrenia ; Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1997; ISBN 3462026178

literature

• Burke, R. (1995) The Truth Effect, published as: When the Music's Over: My Journey into Schizophrenia (R. Gates and R. Hammond eds), New York, Basic Books (Originally published: Armidale, University of New England, 1993).
• Copernicus, N. (1976) On the revolutions of the heavenly spheres (AM Duncan trans.), Newton Abbot, David and Charles.
• Brendan Stone: Knowing, Not-knowing, Fiction: Remembering Ross David Burke . In: Narrative, Memory & Knowledge: Representations, Aesthetics, Contexts. University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, pp. 91-99, here online (pdf)

Web links

• Book review in the Los Angeles Times, Jan. 8, 1995