Life Inside
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
The patient is an ascetically pretty 15½-year-old white female. She is intelligent, fearful, extremely anxious, and depressed. Her rage is poorly controlled and inappropriately expressed.
Diagnostic Impression: Program for social recovery in a supportive and structured environment appears favorable.
Life Inside
In 1967, three months before her sixteenth birthday, Mindy Lewis was sent to a state psychiatric hospital by court order. She had been skipping school, smoking pot, and listening to too much Dylan. Her mother, at a loss for what else to do, decided that Mindy remain in state custody until she turned eighteen and became a legal, law-abiding, "healthy" adult.
Life Inside is Mindy's story about her coming-of-age during those tumultuous years. In honest, unflinching prose, she paints a richly textured portrait of her stay on a psychiatric ward -- the close bonds and rivalries among adolescent patients, the politics and routines of institutional life, the extensive use of medication, and the prevalence of life-altering misdiagnoses. But this memoir also takes readers on a journey of recovery as Lewis describes her emergence into adulthood and her struggle to transcend the stigma of institutionalization. Bracingly told, and often terrifying in its truths, Life Inside is a life-affirming memoir that informs as it inspires.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the tradition of Girl, Interrupted and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Lewis details her often harrowing experiences as an adolescent trapped in a psychiatric hospital and her more than 30-year recovery and redemption from having been diagnosed schizophrenic at age 15. Skipping school, experimenting with drugs and raging against an overbearing mother were Lewis's rather typical acts of 1960s-style rebellion, yet they earned her 28 months of institutionalization and intensive regimens of psychotropic medication. During her hospitalization, Lewis was kept in pajamas (to discourage escape attempts), which only encouraged sexual experimentation with other patients. Suicide attempts were rife, too, and several of her closest friends succeeded. Lewis broke free from this maelstrom at age 18, when she could no longer be held against her will. She attended college, tried various therapies, joined the Mental Patients Liberation Project, and developed long-dormant artistic skills. She also found herself caring for her dying father. Jobs came and went, as did her depression and anger, yet the will to survive never abandoned her. In the spirit of the work of R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz, Lewis's story calls into question the very definition of mental illness and the system that makes such determinations. After accessing her medical records with the diagnosis of chronic schizophrenia she declared, "I do not believe it. I was never schizophrenic. Not then, not now." Now a visual artist and writer, Lewis provides a moving, poignant and enraging, yet redemptive, account of one woman's refusal to accept victimization, powerfully told in vivid, poetic prose.
