Brave Journalist Describes her Days in the “Loony Bin”.
Mar 2nd, 2009 by Patrick Valtin
The psychiatry field has come under a lot of fire lately for all those financial ties that big-time psychiatrists have with drug makers. Case in point: Noted Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Biederman stands accused by Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa of failing to report more than $1.6 million in payments he received from pharmaceutical firms like Johnson & Johnson and Eli Lilly. In January, Biederman agreed to stop working on drug company-sponsored clinical trials until the allegations are fully investigated by Massachusetts General Hospital, where he works.
There are concerns, too, that psychiatrists in the real world of city hospital psych wards and small private practices spend far too much time writing prescriptions and far too little time listening to patients to help them work through issues that may be the root of their illnesses. Norah Vincent explores this controversy through firsthand personal experience: She becomes a patient herself, documenting what she saw in her new book, Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin (Viking, 2008).
Norah Vincent’s New York Times bestselling book, Self-Made Man, ended on a harrowing note. Suffering from severe depression after her eighteen months living disguised as a man, Vincent felt she was a danger to herself. On the advice of her psychologist she committed herself to a mental institution. Out of this raw and overwhelming experience came the idea for her next book. She decided to get healthy and to study the effect of treatment on the depressed and insane “in the bin,” as she calls it.
Vincent’s journey takes her from a big city hospital to a facility in the Midwest and finally to an upscale retreat down south, as she analyzes the impact of institutionalization on the unwell, the tyranny of drugs-as-treatment, and the dysfunctional dynamic between caregivers and patients. Vincent applies brilliant insight as she exposes her personal struggle with depression and explores the range of people, caregivers, and methodologies that guide these strange, often scary, and bizarre environments. Eye opening, emotionally wrenching, and at times very funny, Voluntary Madness is a riveting work that exposes the state of mental healthcare in America from the inside out.