Dolly Sen is a well known artist and activist working and exploring what it means to experience mental distress and the effects of being labelled with a psychiatric diagnosis. The book is witty, humorous, but also cutting and corusacting subtly getting under the skin of everyday psychiatric assumptions that leaves one feeling both wiser and nourished yet still in good humour. We are all the better for this book.

As a child, Dolly Sen was an alien in Empire Strikes Back. She knew then she would never know normal life. Her journey as an artist has taken her up a tree in Regents Park, to California’s Death Row, to the Barbican, Tower Bridge and the Royal Academy, Trafalgar Square, and up a ladder to screw a lightbulb into the sky. She is a writer, filmmaker, artist and performer who uses her creativity to change the way people view madness.

“Packed with laugh out loud moments, I’d urge you that if you find you must read any copy of the DSM, make it this one.” - Recovery in the Bin

“Dolly Sen’s DSM 69 is a work of genius. It is a roadmap through her creativity and her intent to use art as a way to change the narrative given her; to claim her life for herself and to find dignity in who she has become in the quest to reclaim madness as a source of humour and of comfort.’ - Colin Hambrook, Disability Arts Online.