Hospital Always Wins

April 15, 2016
A heady brew of sex, drugs, painting, and music fills this memoir by a man who spent nearly two decades in a mental hospital.An artist, musician, and writer, Ibrahim descended into paranoid schizophrenia in his early 20s; believing his mother was possessed, he killed her in an attempt to exorcise her. In this memoir, he weaves together two stories. One is the story of his life before his incarceration, including colorful portraits of a loving and enterprising marijuana-addicted mother and a much-absent jazz musician father as well as an account of his alarming hallucinations and his increasing paranoia. The second story is about his survival after incarceration. Briefly jailed in hellish Rikers Island, Ibrahim was ruled not guilty by reason of insanity and spent most of his years at Creedmoor, a huge state mental hospital in Queens Village, New York. He writes scathingly of its violence, homosexual sex, staff unprofessionalism, and administrative ineptitude. His talent for painting eventually got him to Creedmoor's Living Museum, an art studio and sanctuary for patients, where he flourished. No shrinking violet, the author regales readers with tales of his sexual escapades with female staff, his success as a painter and a musician, the intransigence of his psychiatrists, and the loyalty and diligence of his lawyer. The incarceration chapters show him as a mature man struggling for his freedom; the chapters spliced between show him as a drug-addicted youth spiraling down into madness. The two interwoven narratives reach their climaxes with the older imprisoned Ibrahim achieving his freedom and the youthful Ibrahim killing his mother. This occasionally overwhelming torrent of words reveals both an irrepressible individual with a talent for survival and a mental health system in dire need of repair.

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July 1, 2016

New York artist Ibrahim's first book is the story of his life and the crime he committed that led to him spending 19 years at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, NY, following his insanity defense for the murder of his mother. In this memoir, the author takes the extensive and necessary road of retelling his upbringing in order to comprehend and contextualize this horrible act of violence. At the same time, he recounts his years as an inpatient in the psychiatric hospital, unveiling the interior life of the hospital's microsociety. Relationships among patients and with staff are charged emotionally but also sexually. In this atmosphere, where limits are easily transgressed, Ibrahim's art, which first gives him an outlet, ultimately provides the discipline he needs to survive and to embark on the road to redemption and freedom. VERDICT Insightful, troubling, touching, poetic, and at times humorous, this book will please readers of offbeat biographies.--Maryse Breton, Bibliotheque et Archives nationales du Quebec

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2016
Artist Ibrahim's desperate memoir feels as though it was carved from his heart. In his early twenties and overtaken by the onset of mental illness, this son of freethinking, creative parents killed the mother whom he both adored and emulated. Years of substance abuse had taken its toll and Ibrahim had imagined she was possessed of demonic powers. When he was arrested and tried, he pleaded insanity and was remanded to Creedmoor, a New York state mental hospital for the criminally insane in Queens. Over decades of incarceration, Ibrahim suffered nearly every mental, physical, and emotional abuse that could be conceived by a racist, sexist, fatally flawed mental-health system designed to favor authority, right or dead wrong, over care and compassion. That the man held himself together enough to become an accomplished artist and writer speaks to unimaginable personal strength and spirit. Indeed, art may have saved him. The palpable frustration, futility, and desperation Ibrahim expresses in his moving and important book demands occasional breaks to confirm that the sun still shines and people can still be kind.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)