Free -range

Jean Pierre Dumoulin, once a successful and extremely intelligent lawyer, was forced to leave the counter for abuse of trust, violation of confidentiality and forgery. He then worked briefly as an administrative assistant at an insurance broker, with an antique dealer, as a night porter in a hotel and later as a seller at a collection agency. However, attacks of razing and reckless behavior as a result of alcohol abuse started to ravage his family more and more often. Alcoholism and escapism became a common thread in his life and would also control the lives of his wife for years.
? For his alcohol addiction, Jean Pierre Dumoulin was repeatedly admitted to clinics and underwent the standard withdrawal cures. An exact diagnosis of his destructive behavior and his tendency to take the legs unannounced in which he regularly ended up in the fringes of society was only made too late later and actually. In the end it became clear that in addition to alcoholism, he also suffered from a manic-depressive disorder.
? Periods of apparently normal family life and relatively success were interspersed with constant alcohol abuse, money wasting and new debts, violence and manic flight behavior, sexual derailment and prostitution visit. He became director of a large collection agency in Brussels, but went to live for that company as a crisis manager in Paris where his drinking was reaching a new low point. After a re -relevant withdrawal cure in a specialized institution, he founded his own collection agency of which he sold his shares a year and a half later to leave for Spain without any sign of life, leaving his wife and four children in Belgium. He wasted a small fortune there and wrote his first novel Café La Lune, a romanticized autobiography full of lies and untruths, who received favorable criticism.
? In his new book Scharrelhane, Dumoulin now confesses the raw truth for the first time about the torment of bipolar disorder and the drink addiction, and the powerlessness and ignorance of psychiatry. He also aptly sketches his colleagues and their therapists and the desolate life in withdrawal clinics. The subtitle confesses should therefore not be understood lightly.
? The author also woven through the entire book of diary notes and reflections by his wife and poet Patricia Lasoen, and fragments from her unpublished novel De Silbermannanden, testimonies that evoke a harrowing image of her life with a totally loosened man .

Scharrelhane is the report of a wild shattered and degraded life, characterized by manic depression and alcoholism. But it is also a fierce criticism of psychiatry and the uselessness of many therapies.
It is also compelling and excellently written