Agnes's Jacket: A Psychologist's Search for the Meanings of Madness Book

In a Victorian-era German asylum, seamstress Agnes Richter painstakingly stitched a mysterious autobiographical text into every inch of the jacket she created from her institutional uniform. Despite every attempt to silence them, hundreds of other patients have managed to get their stories out, at least in disguised form. Today, in a vibrant underground net-work of “psychiatric survivor groups” all over the world, patients work together to unravel the mysteries of madness and help one another re-cover. Optimistic, courageous, and surprising, Agnes’s Jacket takes us from a code-cracking bunker during World War II to the church basements and treatment centers where a whole new way of understanding the mind has begun to take form.

A vast gulf exists between the way medicine explains psychiatric illness and the experiences of those who suffer. Hornstein’s luminous work helps us bridge that gulf, guiding us through the inner lives of those diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar illness, depression, and paranoia and emerging with nothing less than a new model for understanding one another and ourselves.

Publishers Weekly

Hornstein, a professor of psychology at Mount Holyoke, investigates personal testimonies of madness for what they can teach us about mental illness and its treatment. The author spent several years attending meetings of "survivors'A " groups, such as the Hearing Voices Network in the U.K., whose members hear voices but reject the notion that they are mentally ill. In addition to these stories, Hornstein presents many forms of personal expression by those suffering from mental illnesses, including archived video recordings, writings through history and the artwork of the Prinzhorn collection (of which the eponymous jacket is an example), the basis for the modern understanding of "outsider art." Hornstein concludes that mental illness is primarily based in trauma, as opposed to the dominant view of biological and hereditary origins. Behind the psychiatric profession's attachment to such views she sees, as do other psychiatric dissidents, the profiteering influence of prescription drug companies. A wealth of compelling characters includes the eccentric and the heartbreakingly resilient. Despite some repetition of narrative detail, the fascinating avenues Hornstein pursues and the humanity and thoroughness of this exploration make a serious contribution to critiques of contemporary psychiatry. (Apr.)