It is a stunning building and it has touched the lives of many

It is a stunning building and it has touched the lives of many.”. It is due to reopen in 2006.Graham Allen, the project director, said the building had once symbolised grand aspirations for the city. “It is in the heart of Birmingham, funded by the town rates and built as a meeting place for the people, not for the borough council, which met elsewhere,” he said. Among improvements to be started this summer will be floodlights for its columns and re-creation of a “standing concert space”, used during Victorian performances and dances, and seated halls.

Two balconies – one added in 1927 – will be replaced by a single tier, in keeping with Joseph Hansom’s original designs, to aid original acoustics and the sense of space within the hall. Visitors included Charles Dickens, William Gladstone and David Lloyd George, but it was best known as a musical venue for classical works and for more modern artists including Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan and the Beatles.Now, seven years after being closed because of decay, the Town Hall will benefit from a £32m refurbishment project also funded by Birmingham City Council. Birmingham Town Hall, the Grade 1-listed landmark where works by Mendelssohn and Elgar were first aired, has won a £13.5m lottery grant to restore it to its 19th-century prime. I would also have liked more discussion of how the theories embraced by modern psychiatry – the idea that schizophrenia is just a brain disease – have contributed to the exclusive reliance on drugs.

Nonetheless, this book should be required reading for politicians, pundits and anyone whose idea of modern psychiatric care is a psychoanalyst perched at the end of a sumptuously-upholstered couch.The reviewer’s book ‘Madness Explained’ will be published by Allen Lane this summer. We meet patients who exacerbate their own symptoms by taking street drugs, but also success stories such as Rufus May, once a schizophrenia patient and now a practising clinical psychologist.If I have one criticism, it is that the relaxed style makes it difficult to trace the research literature that has informed the conclusions. Good practices are described, such as a mental health service in Bradford that involves former patients in decision-making, is sensitive to patients’ cultural circumstances, and uses drugs only as a last resort. Above all, Laurance sees hope in the rising clamour for consumer control.The numerous, vivid vignettes of interaction between clinicians and patients are a major strength of this book. We follow psychiatrists and social workers on a tour of acute psychiatric wards, hostels and squalid inner-city flats where discharged patients have taken up residence.