• Complain

Vincent - Voluntary madness: lost and found in the mental healthcare system

Here you can read online Vincent - Voluntary madness: lost and found in the mental healthcare system full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: New York, year: 2014, publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc., genre: Art. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

No cover
  • Book:
    Voluntary madness: lost and found in the mental healthcare system
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Penguin Group USA, Inc.
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2014
  • City:
    New York
  • Rating:
    3 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 60
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Voluntary madness: lost and found in the mental healthcare system: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Voluntary madness: lost and found in the mental healthcare system" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

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.

Voluntary madness: lost and found in the mental healthcare system — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Voluntary madness: lost and found in the mental healthcare system" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
Voluntary madness lost and found in the mental healthcare system - image 1
Table of Contents

Voluntary madness lost and found in the mental healthcare system - image 2
ALSO BY NORAH VINCENT
Self-Made Man
VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group USA Inc 375 Hudson - photo 3
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in 2008 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.


Copyright Norah Vincent, 2008
All rights reserved

Names and certain characteristics of individuals, hospitals, and other facilities have been changed to protect peoples privacy.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Vincent, Norah.
Voluntary madness : my year lost and found in the loony bin / by Norah Vincent.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-440-64103-9
1. Vincent, NorahMental health. 2. Psychiatric hospital patientsUnited StatesBiography.
3. JournalistsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
RC464.V56A3 2008
362.21092dc22 2008029034

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.

http://us.penguingroup.com

TO TEDDY
CURRICULUM
In November 2004, just as I was finishing the research for my book Self-Made Man, I checked myself into a locked psychiatric ward in the hospital.
I never finished that research. Instead it was cut short by a depressive breakdown that scared me enough to convince me that it would be better both for me and for those around me if I didnt go on walking the streets looking for someone to hurt me.
It may sound unduly dramatic to suggest that writing a book would drive a person into the bin (though Im sure there are at least a few hundred thousand Ph.D. candidates and other wee-hour scribblers out there who would beg to differ on this score), but in my case, it was quite literally true. I lost it, in medias research, so to speak, and for good reason.
The research for Self-Made Man had been unorthodox, to say the least, since it had entailed disguising myself and then living, dating, working, and recreating as a man. I became a man, at least as far as the people around me knew, but I remained a woman, and that psycho-emotional contradiction in terms pulled me apart at the seams slowly and insidiously for eighteen months, leaving me limp and in tatters, sitting semicatatonic in my pajamas outside a nurses station in the hospital, torporously signing away my freedom and giving my consent to be forcibly restrained if necessary.
Real lives and lived experience are the laboratory of the immersion journalist, and the journalist herself is the guinea pig. Consequently, a lot can change between the proposal and the finished book, and always does.
That is the whole purpose, after all. If you knew what was going to happen in the end, there would be no point in starting. Setting out to prove a point only colors the experience and then skews the results more than your inescapable subjectivity and prejudices already do. You have to leap. You have to be a bit reckless. Maybe more than a bit. Maybe a lot.
This is at once the adventure and the peril of what I do, and, for better or worse, it means I follow where the rabbit hole leads.
Last time around it landed me in the bin. But once I got there, I realized that bins are pretty fertile ground for writers of my stripe, and not altogether uninteresting places to be locked away for a few days with a notebook and a crayon (or whatever other nubby stylus theyll let you get your certifiable fist around).
As I sat there in the ward that November, wondering how the hell I was going to talk my way out of that zombie parlor, I said to myself, Jesus, what a freak show. All I have to do is sit here and take notes, and Im Balzac.
And that was it. Bam. That was how the idea for this book came to me, and I to it. Of course, idea is the operative word here, since the book I set out to write and the book you are holding in your hands are two quite different things. But then, as Ive said, being an immersion journalist, I expected that.
I started in that ward with the theatricality of it all, distanced from my own condition, contemptuous, trapped, yet interested. But interested the way a field entomologist is interested, stooping to see, a deigning species apart, marveling at the hive or the colony and poking it with her pencil to get a better view.
Somerset Maugham once wrote that quotation is a passable substitute for wit, and so for me, prurience was a passable substitute for something better. Imagination? Diligence? Insight? I dont know. I thought I was in a foreign country, and so, like every frisky tourist, whose intrusiveness is pure entitlement, I was curious about the customsand possessive, too. I wanted these people to myself, to make them mine in word and sentence.
These were living dolls, characters ready-made for me, shuffling by in all their goggle-eyed magnitude and efflorescent distress. I liked them that way, and I watched.
I did not accept, then, that I was one of them, and that the foreign country, the theater, the rabbit hole, was not out there but in my head.
I spent four lost, interminable days in lockup that first time in the bin, getting worse, weeping at the sealed windows, yelping for rescue through the pay phone in the soul-destroying dayroom, wrapping into my roommates seamless paranoia, and, finally, out of sheer rage, altogether losing what was left of my tenuous grip.
Then, scared Soviet of being stuck in there for months, I resolved to slip the trap and ingratiate myself to the pen pushers and paper pilers of the system. I put up a front of cool argument and reasoned my way out.
I got home a wreck, and swore that, no matter how bad I felt, I would never willingly go into such a place again. Never.
And yet, there was the lure, the powerful lure of the spectacle, and the human drama, and what I saw as the outright wrongs of the insanitarium, wrongs that I so longed to expose and ridicule, and hold up to public scrutiny. I felt centripetally attracted to the subject matter, to what I couldnt help seeing as the thematic cornucopia of the bin.
Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Voluntary madness: lost and found in the mental healthcare system»

Look at similar books to Voluntary madness: lost and found in the mental healthcare system. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Voluntary madness: lost and found in the mental healthcare system»

Discussion, reviews of the book Voluntary madness: lost and found in the mental healthcare system and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.