Asylum

About the Book

A professional engineer. A family man. An Australian citizen. An asylum seeker in a foreign detention centre.

In "Asylum", Greg Ralls recounts the extraordinary true story of how a mental health crisis led him from ordinary life in Australia to confinement inside the healthcare unit of Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre near London's Heathrow Airport.

Behind steel doors, brick walls and razor wire, paranoia and fear intensified. Believing his life was in danger, Ralls became caught in a terrifying struggle for survival one that culminated in violence, segregation, police interview, and the slow return of insight.

But "Asylum" is more than a personal crisis narrative. It is also a confronting look at immigration detention, voice-hearing, delusion, institutional power, human vulnerability, faith, family, and the thin line between protection and imprisonment.

Raw, urgent and unsettling, this memoir asks how a law-abiding professional from a secure country could end up detained as an asylum seeker and what such an experience reveals about mental illness, freedom and the systems we build to contain people.

A gripping follow-up to "Unravel: To Unwell and Back", "Asylum" is a story of breakdown, confinement, consequence and eventual return.