Carried Away: To An Insane Asylum: Reminiscences of Growing up in an Insane Asylum in Reykjavik

Carried Away is a unique childhood memoir that serves not only as an historical testament to life in post World War Two Iceland, but also as an engaging query into the very nature of mental illness. As such, this book can appeal to a wide audience that includes children as well as adults, older children, ever feeling themselves to be outsiders, can readily identify with the life of this introspective and adventuresome boy. Scholars and students of a number of disciplines can also, of course, benefit from this ethnography of an insane asylum. As a first-person account from someone who is neither an alien observer nor a patient, this narrative deserves study in the fields of historical psychology, psychiatry, and cultural anthropology. Additionally, Carried Away can be important to the field of cultural criticism, in which critics like Foucault, in his Madness and Civilization, question the pathologizing of harmless (if puzzling) human behavior.

Jón Helgi describes his most unusual childhood in Iceland. A German among Icelanders, a Catholic among Protestants, and especially as a presumed healthy young boy living with the mentally ill. He grew up in the psychiatric clinic of Reykjavik and got to know the land and its people from this vantage point. He was able to maintain his unusual and relativizing viewpoint later as a writer and a theorist of psychology