Better known as a travel writer rather than as a campaigner for mental health care, the author of the original Rough Guide To France and The Rough Guide to Paris tells the moving story of his son's - and thus his own - twenty-year struggle with schizophrenia. Tim believes passionately that it needed to be told, for the "outside" world - and he includes many of the professionals in that - know little of the daily reality of living with schizophrenia. He dedicates this frank, no-holds-barred account to all those who find themselves in the same boat, both sufferers and relatives, all of whom, once this bizarre illness strikes, find themselves thrown into a chaotic situation that is always bewildering and often as downright terrifying as it is heartbreaking. His story includes his dealings with the care services, "a pretty shameful record of incompetence, buck-passing and lack of communication and co-ordination" and the mental health charities, whom he has not spared - "for in their devotion to the sloppy, evasive language of political correctness, they have dangerously underplayed the seriousness of real mental illness like schizophrenia."