The Angel and the Dragon: A Father's Search For Answers to his Son's Mental Illness and Suicide. Jonathon Aurthur; Health Communications, Inc., 2002.

When a parent buries a child, the bible reminds us, the natural order of the world is upended. When a child takes their own life the disorder becomes near to - or beyond - the overwhelming. Jonathon Aurthur's book explores in a personal and probing manner how a father comes to terms with the mental illness and suicide of his 23-year-old son. His book is an unusual addition to the literature of patient narratives, this one from the parent's perspective, and it has much to offer to addiction professionals.

Charley Aurthur grew up an apparently "happy little boy," and was an artistically inclined and high-achieving student at Reed Collge in Oregon. The father's narrative begins to unravel the day he received a phone call from a police officer informing him of his son's "single car accident." The policeman asks the shocked father whether his son had a history of mental illness, since he had been acting bizarrely. What follows is a harrowing five-year story of hospitalizations, self-destructive behavior, attempts to face and to deny substance abuse and addictions, competing and conflicting psychotherapies, and a host of medications, all ultimately ending with Charley's successful suicide, jumping off an overpass in Santa Monica into incoming traffic.

Aurthur's account is both heartfelt and thoughtful, always reflective while never losing the elegiac tone of an unfolding tragedy. Many lessons emerge for addiction professionals: the limits of the medical and "disease" model of mental illness and addiction, the conflict between "brain" versus "mind" approaches to human unhappiness, the way therapists get wedded to their theoretical orientation, how easy it is for patients to fall into the gaps in our mental health system, the painful miscommunications that haunt the father-son relationship, and, finally, the mysterious and heartbreaking nature of suicide.

Sam Osherson, PhD, is a psychologist in private practice in Cambridge, MA, and teaches at the Fielding Graduate Institute. He is the author of Finding Our Fathers: How A Man's Life is Shaped by His Relationship With His Father, among other books. He can be reached at www.drsamosh.com or e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

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