Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin

At first Norah Vincent's book idea seemed unique: a memoir about staying in three mental hospitals. However, don't let the title mislead you. Vincent did not spend a year entering and exiting the "looney bin." She had three short stays. The rest of the book is spent acknowledging the challenges of diagnosing mental illness (I found her views on this to be insightful and thought-provoking), the side effects and possible inefficacy of medication, and the role played by pharmaceutical companies and physicians in over-diagnosing and over-medicating patients.

The book would have been more compelling had Vincent provided a more balanced view. At times, it seems she contradicted her own arguments. For example, she blasts the use of anti-depressants, but yet she takes them. When she stops taking them, she falls into a depression severe enough for hospitalization.

I was also dismayed when she entered one facility and discouraged a patient from taking his prescribed medications. She is a journalist, not a medical professional. Her interference with her fellow patient's care was out of line.

Although Vincent is validly depressed during one of her hospital stays, the other two were true "immersion journalism" in which she enters as a healthy patient posing as a sick one. A few days' stay in a mental hospital by someone who is not sick does not truly evaluate the effectiveness of our mental health system or provide a real insider's look at a hospital stay. Several more compelling memoirs have already been written by people who have suffered from mental illness and spent longer stays at such hospitals.