All In My Head

All In My Head, The silence is deafening is a searingly honest and psychologically immersive memoir by Rhys Westacott, a professional architect and traumatic brain injury (TBI) survivor.

After a catastrophic fall, he sustained a large skull fracture across three of his primary cranial bones and, multiple haemorrhaging to his brain. In the days that followed, he lay alone, unaware of the severity of his injuries, drifting in an out of consciousness. From this point of rupture, the life he lived, in the world he knew, from his unparalleled mind, had expired. This memoir chronicles the long, invisible and profoundly isolating recovery that ensued, from such an instantly brutal transformation.

What distinguishes this memoir is not the drama of the accident itself but the extraordinary precision with which it maps the interior landscape of a brain in crisis and, the inescapable need to relearn how he must live again. He renders, with clinical clarity and disarming candour, the sensory hypersensitivity, cognitive overload, identity fracture and, emotional volatility that define a TBI recovery from its earliest and most bewildering stages while unable to process his own diagnosis.