SHEFFIELD AUTHORS

Kathryn's Cultivating Mad Cow is a transformative story. It’s a story about love, passion, desperation, mental illness, but most of all it’s a story about human connection. It carefully observes how those deep connections can save lives. Kathryn, a child protection social worker, became severely mentally ill in 2004. During several months of isolation, oscillating between mania, depression and psychosis, building a nine foot papier maché penis in her garden and getting herself arrested every time she left the house, Kathryn became connected to the outside world through a telephone counsellor Barry White, who reaches out to Kathryn in an attempt to save her from the chaos of her world, but when his own professional boundaries begin to be compromised, the tragedy happens. On 4th October that year, Kathryn tried to end her own life in the most violent of ways. The human connection continues when the surgeons at the hospital battle to save her life and attempt to her with some quality of life amidst the mass of complex injuries she sustained.
This unique, sometimes funny, sometimes sad story will leave you in no doubt about the importance of the power of human connection, love and human resilience.