Loony Bin Trip - Softcover

Millett, Kate

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671740288 ISBN 13: 9780671740283

Publisher: Touchstone, 1991

Synopsis

The renowned feminist and author recounts her private battle against manic depression and its stigma--her decision to go off her medication, doubts about her own sanity, the loyalty of her friends, and time spent in an Irish mental hospital

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

They have come to make a bust. But they call it "talking." My legs shake. The terror in my mind is like a machine out of order. But I must talk. I must look good. I must answer the trick questions perfectly. Maybe I can dissuade them. A bust is an examination-which I am fool enough always to imagine I can pass. A life-time of passing tests has never prepared me for the kind that are rigged, for the ones that cannot be passed, were not meant to be.

Of course there is no denying the misery and stress of life itself: the sufferings of the mind at the mercy of emotion, the circumstances which set us at war with one another, the divorces and antagonisms in human relationships, the swarms of fears, the blocks to confidence, the crises of decision and choice. These are the things we weather or fail to, seek council against, even risk the inevitable disequilibrium of power inherent in therapy to combat-they are the grit and matter of the human condition. But when such circumstances are converted into symptoms and diagnosed as illnesses, I believe we enter upon very uncertain ground.

Review:

During the 1970s a powerful movement grew out of the merging of feminism and what was then called "radical therapy." The demand for the civil rights of psychiatric patients focused on opposition to involuntary hospitalization, electroshock therapy and drugs like thorazine and stelazine. Nothing has done more to undermine this challenge to psychiatry than the introduction of powerful new psychoactive drugs and the ideology of the biochemical basis of mental illness.

The story told by Kate Millet, the author of Sexual Politics (417) and a founding mother of both the women's liberation and anti-psychiatry movements, perfectly illustrates the insidiousness of this new approach. When Kate was involuntarily committed to an asylum in 1973, she fought for, and won, her freedom through a civil rights suit. But the damage was done. Diagnosed as manic-depressive and considered crazy by her friends and family, she began treatment with lithium. This book tells what happened when, after seven years, she decided to go off the lithium. Scrutinized by those around her for the tell-tale signs of craziness, she soon finds that every action becomes suspect. A brilliant book that persuasively argues for acceptance of diverse mental and emotional states, and against their treatment as an illness, this is a must read for women on both sides of the therapist's desk. -- From The WomanSource Catalog & Review: Tools for Connecting the Community for Women; review by PCP

About this edition

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0671740288
• ISBN 13: 9780671740283
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320