THIS is a moving and profound account of an unexpected friendship. Part autobiography, part social history, part biography, it began when a small group of “do-gooders/befrienders/nosy buggers (choose your epithet)” decided to visit a drop-in centre, near their church, for people with mental-health problems.

Susie Stead struck up a conversation with “Stephen”, who was then sectioned in a mental hospital. They began meeting regularly and talking endlessly. It is honest, combative, and often bruising. With his permission, Stead began recording their conversations, typing them up, and reading them back to him.

The narrative offers regular responses from the listening Stephen as he hears his life in another voice — nodding, disagreeing, and adding his own commentary. “If it hadn’t been Good Friday, I’d have decked him.”

Stephen struggled for most of his life with severe mental-health issues, endured 25 years inside British psychiatric wards, and never felt acceptable outside them. “I was institutionalised Susie.” All the harrowed details are there of the personal impact of social and political approaches to the care of those beyond the margins of what is called the “normal world”. “It was hard Susie.”

But, as the title suggests, there is an emerging story from the inside of a man “with powerful convictions, deep longings, wide interests and an integrity that would not be compromised, whatever the cost”. It is “a story of grave injustices, saints and bigots and angels hidden in plain sight”.

On her own admission, Stead began with a desire to “help” Stephen to “get better”, but found herself drawn deeper, untrained and ill equipped, into a friendship that relentlessly probed much of her own self-understanding, too.

It is all about what it means to be human — a question that needs to be explored more than ever in our times. The book is a gift for that task. Stead is a faithful friend and storyteller, and the two of them are unusual conversation partners, who invite us to listen in. “Stephen nods adding, ‘totally berserk!’ and starts chuckling.”

The Revd David Runcorn is a theological teacher, writer, and spiritual director. His latest book is Love Means Love (SPCK, 2020).

Stephen from the Inside Out
Susie Stead
Emily Mosley, illustrator
Impress Books £9.99
(978-1-911293-68-2)
Church House Bookshop £8.99