About the book
A true story, told as a novel
The approach
Creative nonfiction
Comradery of the Damned is creative nonfiction. It reads like a novel, but it is a nonfiction account of real lives: the author’s own, and those of the people he lived beside inside the asylum.
The people in these pages are mental patients, and their privacy deserves respect, so every name has been changed. In some places dates and times have been changed too, and occasionally the order of events, to make the narrative clearer and easier to follow.
No events have been made up. The people are real, and so is everything that happened to them.
Why it matters
The asylum moved behind bars
383,000
people with severe psychiatric illness were behind bars in the United States in 2014. That is nearly ten times the number of patients left in the nation’s state psychiatric hospitals.
Source: Treatment Advocacy Center
44%
of people in jail, and 37% of people in prison, had been told by a mental health professional that they had a mental disorder.