Books, films, short stories, essays

by David Laing Dawson and Marvin Ross

This site is dedicated to an honest depiction of mental illness, especially schizophrenia.

We offer books and films on the subject, some of which are dramas and novels that tell

the story of mental illness in a manner that documentaries and scholarly works cannot.

   Cutting for Stone  - feature film - available on DVD      

   Schizophrenia: Medicine's Mystery, Society's Shame 

                                by Marvin Ross  187 pages              Buy Now  

     Slide in All Direction   - a novel by David laing Dawson     Buy Now

   Class of '67   - a novel by David Laing Dawson     Buy Now

    My Name is Walter James Cross  -  Available on DVD

Cutting for Stone, as depicted in the paintings of Bosch and Bruegel, was a surgical technique used in the middle ages for extracting the "Stone of Madness" . It may have been mostly fakery, and it didn't work. Despite the advancement of knowledge, of effective medical treatment, less than fifty percent of sufferers receive treatment today.  Many experience worse fates than people with these illnesses thirty and forty years ago. It is estimated that there are 500,000 seriously mentally ill in American Prisons. A common outcome of a mental illness today is homelessness.

It is with this in mind that we have named our site, and our feature film on the subject: Cutting for Stone.