The Loony-Bin Trip Book

"The Loony-Bin Trip" is the powerful, staggeringly personal story of Kate Millett's struggle to regain control of her life after falling under an ascription of manic depression. Compulsively readable, Millett's journey into 'that other region' traverses a fearful terrain of self-doubt, futility, and alienation. Beginning with the summer at her farm in Poughkeepsie, New York, when she decides to prove her sanity by going off the lithium prescribed to combat depression, Millett courses through a season of doubt about her own sanity and the loyalty of the people around her. Tormented by the fear that her own mind is 'too dangerous' to be left to its own devices, haunted by recollections of two brief, involuntary commitments to mental hospitals - the first by a doctor who mockingly commented, 'Your only mistake was in trusting the people who brought you here' - she becomes increasingly terrified of being 'captured' again. Millett's nightmares come true when she is forcibly confined to a mental hospital while traveling in Ireland. 'I am telling you what happened to me', Kate Millett says, 'in the hope that it may help all those who have been or are about to be in the same boat'. Her story illuminates not only the personal but also the social conditions - the 'general superstition' - of mental illness. A new preface comments on recent movements for patients' rights and notes touchstone books that have begun to tread the still-taboo ground of psychiatric confinement.Read More