Voluntary Madness by Norah Vincent

From The Week of August 15, 2010

Partially as a consequence of her yearlong social experiment living outwardly as a man, an experiment documented in Self-made Man, Ms. Vincent experienced a resurgence in her chronic depression. The intensity of this episode was serious enough that she was encouraged by her therapist to commit herself to a mental institution. Ms. Vincent, whose curiosity is commendably boundless, turned her time as an in-patient into an opportunity to observe not only the personalities of her fellow detainees, but the attitudes of their keepers. The results of what she saw in her initial stay, and what she went onto witness in her investigational visits, are documented in a book that is, at times, moving and disturbing.

Voluntary Madness is driven by two core purposes: the quest for mental health in the modern, American medical system and an investigation into and expose of that same medical system. After recovering her equilibrium, Ms. Vincent checks out of her hospital and, provoked by her time there, decides to update the Nelly Bligh experiment. She voluntarily checks herself into three American, wellness centers which range from the entirely mainstream to the completely quirky. At each stop in her journey, she chronicles the injustices she witnesses, from the aloof doctors, to the system's over-reliance on sedatives, to the cruelties of burnt-out orderlies. But Ms. Vincent isn't always critical. She's careful to document the positives, though, these seem frighteningly and dangerously contingent upon the having of a good and ethical doctor. Throughout the investigation, Ms. Vincent comments on the drugs the patients are given, sketching out their histories, their over-proscription, and the healthy relationships their manufacturers have with the doctors who issue them.

This is excellent work. It would have been easy for Ms. Vincent to decry all that she saw, condemning it in the name of simple outrage, but her approach, while critical, feels even-handed and fair. Her ability to humanize even the worst of her fellow inmates is admirable and shows the open-mind necessary for the undertaking of a project as serious as this. Her criticism of the insurance industry, which drives up the cost for people in need of help, is rightfully savage. But it's her own journey to find the right path towards wellness that earned my sympathy. Many of us cannot relate to the problems suffered by those with chronic depression, but virtually all of us have had to confront a massive problem in our lives which did not come packaged with a ready solution, a problem whose investigation only threw up a myriad of possible answers which weren't guaranteed to be effective. This is the exact dilemma faced by so many of those like Ms. Vincent. And it's clear that everyone from the politicians, to the insurers, to the doctors, are letting them down. (4/5 Stars)