'I came across an old book about the psychology of sailing, written by a German professor, and put together a proposal for an updated version,' he recalls. Nic – who has written 18 books – hadn't set out to produce this one.
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Signs with that message used to be common in many offices – and it's a phrase that repeatedly springs to mind when reading the latest book fromĪ nominee for the 2018 Maritime Foundation Mountbatten Award for Best Book, his 280-page work – Off the Deep End: A History of Madness at Sea – comes at a time when the industry has been paying increasing attention to the mental health of seafarers.ĭescribed by reviewers as 'horrifying', 'engrossing' and 'gripping', the book examines the particular pressures and factors that can challenge sanity at sea.įrom stress to scurvy, mirages to 'cabin fever', it goes a long way to explain why, for instance, the Royal Navy's Physician of the Fleet once concluded that sailors were seven times more likely to go mad than the rest of the population. 'You dont have to be mad to work here, but it helps'. ANDREW LININGTON meets an author who has come to some interesting conclusions after delving through the archives… Is seafaring worse for a worker’s mental health than other professions? It’s difficult to be certain, but there is a large body of evidence attesting to the 'madness' of mariners over the centuries.