Table of Contents
ALSO BY NORAH VINCENT
Self-Made Man
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
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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
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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.
