Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
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. Beginning with the summer when she decides to go 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, 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 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.