“They’ll keep you thirty days or until your insurance runs out. Then you’re cured.” It is August 1992. Suzanne Scanlon writes her own story, that of a Freshman woman at Barnard, not quite fitting in, becoming desperately lonely, her main friend a guy she knows who talks suicide with her. Ultimately, she tries it and ends up hospitalized for several years. Suzanne is thoughtful, well-read, traumatized by the death of her mother when she was eight and her father’s remarriage and neglect. She weaves the story of her “treatments” and her eventual discharge and ultimately finding a way to stop using hospitals. She reflects beautifully on the many writers who shared their mental illness/breakdowns with us over the years or who featured fictional characters in need of care for their mental illnesses. Think: Beloved, The Yellow Wallpaper, The Bell Jar, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Girl Interrupted.
Scanlon acknowledges she was ill. One of her former psychiatrists told her her hospitalization lasted so long because it was the best they could do at the time. Prozac was new. For two years, she continued to have periods of partial or inpatient hospitalization after she left the state psychiatric hospital. She notes she had to undo the identity formed by her illness and hospitalization. She comments that formerly long term mental hospital patients are known to regress and require re-hospitalization as a result of institutionalization. It could be more difficult to be out than in. What made it possible for her to live outside those walls was her own personal decision not to commit suicide.
Ultimately a multi-page bibliography at the end of this memoir reminds us that much has been effectively written of women whose mental health is treated differently, ineffectively, and that they are observed as crazy in a different way from men. That they may, like Suzanne be “treated” too long. She comments, “I think that is part of what we mean by mental illness. What you can’t help. … It is either excess or rigidity and often both.” She notes she was “crazy” because she ate only one plain baked potato a day and was described as having bizarre eating habits by a nurse who ate only a pack of rice cakes a day. She notes that the word hysteria, the early term for “crazy women,” came from a theory that movement of the uterus cased the symptoms. It means “wandering uterus” and goes back to Hippocrates. A number of recent writers I am familiar with, and a movement in the UK Scanlon references, are looking at doing away with the various diagnostic labels placed on mental illness and just providing the care needed for the symptoms and illness a person experiences. This rings so true.
As a book fanatic, I loved, loved, loved every literary reference with recognition and a resounding, “Yes!” Scanlon was an English major and she teaches writing. She has much to give and is a wonderful writer. This book flew for me. I went back for more of the substance later and am just writing this some months after reading Committed. She particularly loves Audrey Lorde’s poetry and quotes it as she wraps up her memoir. I need to read Lorde. So, to me this is a hugely meaningful book that I commend to you.
They Called me Bookworm 