Susan Doherty's groundbreaking book brings us a population of lost souls, ill-served by society, feared, shunted from locked wards to rooming houses to the streets to jail and back again. For the past ten years, some of the people who cycle in and out of the severely ill wards of the Douglas Institute in Montreal, have found a friend in Susan, who volunteers on the ward and then follows her friends out into the world as they struggle to get through their days. With their full cooperation, she brings us their stories, challenging the ways we think about people with mental illness on every page.