Voluntary Madness: Lost and Found in the Mental Healthcare System by Norah Vince

Description: Voluntary Madness by Norah Vincent From the "New York Times"-bestselling author of "Self-Made Man" comes this eye-opening, emotionally wrenching, and at times very funny work that exposes the state of mental healthcare in America, from the inside out. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description From the author of The New York Times bestseller Self- Made Man, a captivating expose of depression and mental illness in America Revelatory, deeply personal, and utterly relevant, Voluntary Madness is a controversial work that unveils the state of mental healthcare in the United States from the inside out. At the conclusion of her celebrated first book--Self-Made Man, in which she soent eighteen months disguised as a man-Norah Vincent found herself emotionally drained and severely depressed. Determined but uncertain about maintaining her own equilibrium, she boldly committed herself to three different facilities-a big-city hospital, a private clinic in the Midwest, and finally an upscale retreat in the South. Voluntary Madness is the chronicle of Vincents journey through the world of the mentally ill as she struggles to find her own health and happiness. Author Biography Norah Vincent (1968-2022) was the New York Times bestselling author of the nonfiction books Self-Made Man: One Womans Year Disguised as a Man and Voluntary Madness: Lost and Found in the Mental Healthcare System, as well as two works of fiction: Thy Neighbor and Adeline: A Novel of Virginia Woolf. Formerly an op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times, her work also appeared in the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Washington Post, and she contributed regularly to Salon, the Advocate, and the Village Voice. She was a longtime resident of New York City before her passing in 2022. Review Discussion Question for Reading Group Guide INTRODUCTION The mental institution occupies a shadowy place in todays world: it is as old, as cold, and as foreign as Bedlam, and as hot and new as the latest pop stars latest breakdown. Its a world unto itself, hard to enter, harder to leave, and shut off from the flow of everyday life. This is the world that Norah Vincent decided to explore from the inside out in Voluntary Madness , the follow-up to her bestseller, Self-Made Man . Little did she know at the outset that she would be exposing not just the inner workings of the mental health system, but the deepest recesses of her own mind and soul. Vincent describes herself as an "immersion journalist," one who obliterates the barriers of simple observation and instead reports from the trenches on the sounds, smells, fear, and elation of real life. It was this full-throttle approach that lead to her remarkable first book, Self-Made Man , an account of the eighteen months she spent living, working, and dating while disguised as a man. At the end of that identity-warping year and a half, however, Vincent found herself suffering from a crippling depression and, fearing for her own safety, she voluntarily entered a mental institution. She immediately regretted it. The place seemed inhuman, the staff uncaring, the medication toxic. In other words, it was the perfect subject for a new book. After leaving "the bin," Vincent set about recovering her health and re-admitting herself--this time undercover, alert, and taking notes--to three different facilities: Merriweather, a public institution that temporarily houses some of the inner citys poorest and most disturbed residents; St. Lukes, a private Catholic clinic catering to the depressives and drug addicts of a middle-class, Midwestern suburb; and Mobius, a luxurious, spa-like facility in the south that promotes hands-on therapy over medication. Her goal was to report, as she had in her previous book, from inside an unfamiliar world on the lives of the natives, by passing herself off as one of them. But in this case the thin line between reporter and subject went from thin to indistinguishable almost immediately. While she chronicles her encounters with the patients, Vincent is engaged in an increasingly desperate battle with her own demons. And its one she has to fight with mood-altering drugs that are aggressively marketed to a medical community that doesnt entirely understand their effects by a pharmaceutical industry that doesnt entirely care. Through her visits to three very different facilities in the enormous mental healthcare system, in her conversations with fellow sufferers, arrogant doctors, and a few diligent therapists, Norah Vincent unlocks both the door of the mental asylum and the deeply buried secrets of her own mind. ABOUT NORAH VINCENT Norah Vincent is the author of the New York Times bestseller Self-Made Man . Previously, she wrote a nationally syndicated op-ed column for the Los Angeles Times . Her work has also appeared in The New York Times , The New Republic , The Village Voice , and The Washington Post . She lives in New York City. A CONVERSATION WITH NORAH VINCENT Q. What surprised you most in your experiences at Merriweather, St. Lukes, and Mobius--what was the biggest contradiction to your expectations? Ive thought about this question long and hard, and had trouble coming up with an answer. I guess this means that most of my expectations were confirmed. I expected that going back into the bin would be hard and it was. I expected that it would get personal and it did. The only thing that did shift for me unexpectedly was the emphasis from the institution to the individual. I went in blaming the institutions, expecting to point out their inefficiencies and missteps, and how often they tended to make people worse rather than better. I saw these expectations confirmed and wrote about them. But I also saw a lot of personal refusal and choice, and I came away laying quite a bit of the responsibility to heal chronic dysfunction at the feet of the patients themselves--myself included. In the beginning, I thought, like most of us, that mental illness just happens, and we have to just lie there and take it, or seek sole refuge in drugs and locked doors. But now I think its more complicated than that and that we do have a significant role to play in our own distress as well as our own healing. Q. Did you ever confess your real reasons for being at these institutions to fellow patients, or to staff? Did anyone figure out that you didnt need to be there? At Merriwether, I think the docs had begun to speculate a bit, though Im pretty sure this only happened at the tail end, at least thats what the med student assigned to me told me right before I was discharged. They thought I was genuinely depressed, but they also wondered whether I wasnt going to write something. I had a notebook with me almost all the time, after all. I tried to pass it off as graphomania most of the time, but I dont think everyone bought it. At St. Lukes I wrote in my notebook a lot, too, and didnt bother to hide it really at all. One of the patients said, only half jokingly, "What? Are you writing a book or something?" Another said, "What are you doing here? You look fine." I didnt admit anything until the end, when I did tell my doc and my psychiatrist what I planned to do. The doc didnt know whether to believe me or not. Delusions of grandeur and all that. I told him to Google me, but I think that only made it worse. Q. What do you think accounts for the difference in the quality of the support staff at these three facilities? Partly funding, or efficient versus inefficient use of funding, how much they could pay the staff, and what kind of job or career opportunity they could offer them. Partly clientele--i.e. how dangerous or disturbed the patients were, and how hard or risky it could be to reach them and work among them. Partly culture or mission, that is, what role the institution saw itself playing in the community, what hopes it held out for healing, and the kind of staff it hired in this context. Were they babysitters, jailers, or healers? Were they hired as such? How did they see themselves? Were they punching a clock or pursuing a vocation? All of these things depended a lot on location: urban versus rural versus suburban; status; public versus private; and class, under, middle, or upper-middle. These are many of the factors as I see them, but I dont think any of them is really insurmountable. Its not impossible to make an urban public hospital into something more than a holding pen. Its just harder. Q. You dont mention many outside visitors--family or friends--who come to see patients at the institutions, so we really get that sense of being shut off from the rest of the world. How difficult is it to have visitors as a patient at one of these places? Not particularly difficult if your family lives nearby, or if you have family, though there are usually only a couple of hours set aside per day for that. Still, because youre locked in, and because you cant have access to a lot of items the staff consider potentially dangerous, its a lot more like getting visitors in prison than like getting them in a normal hospital ward, which only adds to the sense of alienation, fear, and loneliness that you, the patient, feel. Q. Have you caught up with any of the other patients you met while researching the book? Only one. Gary from Mobius, who seems to be doing quite well. Otherwise, as I did after I finished Self-Made Man , Ive preferred to separate myself from the experience, and that means leaving behind the people who were part of it as well. Its just something I need to do for my own mental health, to let go of the baggage of the immersion, or to, so to speak, emerge from the immersion. Q. What kind of reactions do you expect from the three institutions you profile once the book is published? What about the mental health community at large? Are you worried about offending anyone? Oh sure. I expect to be ignored. I also expect pretty nasty backlash from some quarters. I think most people in the profession, with the exception of psychologists and other therapists, will dismiss it out of hand as unscientific, conjectural, and out of sorts, or theyll attack me as being an unreliable narrator, none of which is entirely untrue, but of course, it doesnt make everything I say off the mark either. I say in the introduction that this is my story. I wasnt trying to be an investigative reporter. I was trying to tell a story and poke at some unpleasant assumptions and status quos through the lens of my own experience. If Ive done that, some people will be offended, and thats okay, so long as other people--especially the public--are talking, even arguing, and questioning. Q. Why have you chosen to be an "immersion journalist," rather than erecting the more traditional journalistic barriers of distance and objectivity? Objectivity is an illusion, especially in journalism. Look at Fox News and CNN, two sides of the same partisan coin. Besides, I find reports rather boring and all too commonplace. I like the first person. I think it has an immediacy and, for me, a purgative effect thats indispensable. Rather than deny that you, the reporter, are part of the story, embedded in it even, why not explore that embeddedness as a means of learning something about the culture at large and yourself. There is no separating the individual and society/culture, so why pretend? Why not dive in and see what the murk can tell you? Q. Like a lot of people, you have s Details ISBN0143116851 Author Norah Vincent Short Title VOLUNTARY MADNESS Language English ISBN-10 0143116851 ISBN-13 9780143116851 Media Book Format Paperback Audience Age 17-17 DEWEY 362.21092 Residence US Year 2009 Publication Date 2009-12-29 Subtitle Lost and Found in the Mental Healthcare System Place of Publication New York, NY Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2009-12-29 NZ Release Date 2009-12-29 US Release Date 2009-12-29 UK Release Date 2009-12-29 Pages 304 Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc Imprint Penguin USA Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:23059120;

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