“I picked up The Hospital Always Wins and couldn’t put it down. Issa Ibrahim writes with remarkable clarity and an artist’s skill for evoking place and time and the inner landscape of his own mind.”

“Artist Ibrahim’s desperate memoir feels as though it was carved from his heart.”

“A heady brew of sex, drugs, painting, and music fills this memoir by a man who spent nearly two decades in a mental hospital…No shrinking violet, the author regales readers with tales of his sexual escapades with female staff, his success as a painter and a musician, the intransigence of his psychiatrists, and the loyalty and diligence of his lawyer. The incarceration chapters show him as a mature man struggling for his freedom; the chapters spliced between show him as a drug-addicted youth spiraling down into madness…This occasionally overwhelming torrent of words reveals both an irrepressible individual with a talent for survival and a mental health system in dire need of repair.”

“A beautifully written masterpiece of shocking truths, powerful drama, and gripping storytelling. It pulled me down the rabbit hole and spit me out under a deadly cold light, deftly transformed to an unexpected warmth by the remarkable compassion of the author. I couldn’t put it down until the truly shocking finish.”