Is There No Place on Earth for Me? Book

I confess I first approached this book with a voyeur's curiosity. The foreward, written by psychiatrist Robert Coles, Ph.D., quickly upbraided me for seeking titillation and thrills with its firm reminder that patients in psychiatric care are human beings:
Miss Frumkin turns out to be an extremely troubled person whose mind doesn't work, in certain respects, the way most other minds work. The labels psychiatrists use to set Miss Frumkin apart, the diagnostic classifications applied to her, are merely matters of medical convenience ' or should be...She speaks strange thoughts. She behaves oddly. If many of us scratch our heads and dismiss her as peculiar, as unbalanced, as worthy of confinement, we will soon enough meet one, then another person who is similarly afflicted...The issue, then, is clearly the pain and confusion felt by millions of Sylvia Frumkins. It is the aimlessness, melancholy, want of confidence, irresolution, misgivings of all sorts, alarm, terror, and moments of outright panic that torment them.
This is a well-written expose which the passing of time has turned into a historical study, an account of a time when the DSM-III was the standard for diagnosing mental illness, a time when mental health facilities had just begun moving towards treatment and rehabilitation over incarceration and their practices didn't quite line up with their new philosophies. In thorough journalistic style, Sheehan chronicles the state of American psychiatric care in the 1960s and 70s, pulling in details of the socioeconomic, racial, and medical factors that contributed to where a single patient, Miss Sylvia Frumkin, a paranoid schizophrenic in the unfortunate minority of patients deemed "treatment resistant," finds herself. But Sheehan is committed to looking beyond the labels and capturing the essence of the person they might otherwise overshadow and obscure. It is a fascinating and especially vivid account of the history and development of modern psychiatry and mental health treatment.

"Do you know what it's like to keep coming back here?" Miss Frumkin cries out during an intake interview, her fourth of the year 1978 alone. "What torture it is to be sent through the revolving door again and again? The pain, the suffering, do you know how it hurts?" (26)

The pathos of observing an imbalanced mind is tempered by Sheehan's capable writing, which explains technical terminology with rapid ease and is salted throughout with shades of smirking humor ("In psychiatry, simple words are never used where complicated ones will do." [28] "Building N/4 was opened in 1932. It is a grimy building that appears at first glance not to have aged well, a bulding of which one might say that it had seen better days ' unless one chanced upon a photograph of N/4 taken the year it opened. One would then have to say that it was a building that had had no better days." [38])

3 stars. While the human drama is captivating, the story gets bogged down with minutiae that drag the pace down (descriptions of buildings down to the room dimensions, minute-by-minute accounts of staff members' comings and goings, precise dosages of various medications, and so on, are repeated throughout). Sheehan takes almost too professional a journalistic approach, with the "who, what, where, when, why and how" covered so thoroughly they become kind of numbing. Overall, though, this book leaves you with a lot to think about after you put it down.