Book by Darby Penney and Dr. Peter Stastny; Review by Abigail Zuger, M.D., in the New York Times:

A new book attempts to catalog and explain what was found in suitcases left by patients at Willard State Hospital, a gigantic institution that housed people with incurable mental illness from 1869 to 1995. The book, which follows an exhibition, includes a collection of “transfixing” photographs of the residents and their possessions. Dr. Zuger finds the authors’ reasoning “problematic.”

Stories about the experience of illness are in vogue these days. Some seek to humanize medical science, while others (like those in the movie “Sicko” from Michael Moore) aim to change health policy with the brute force of anecdote.

The authors, Darby Penney and Dr. Peter Stastny, are in the second camp. Both are prominent patients’-rights advocates: Dr. Stastny is described on one advocacy Web site as a “dissident psychiatrist” and Ms. Penney as a “long-time activist.” Their platform is clearly stated in the book’s first pages: much mental illness is “understandable reaction to stress,” orthodox psychiatry often “stands in the way of healing” and even the most “distressed” patients will fare better outside institutions.

All may be legitimate subjects for debate, but basing a complex argument on fragmented and archaic case histories is problematic both for science and for style.

… Readers with the stamina to tune them out will be rewarded with an unusual view onto the locked back wards of psychiatry, where that always controversial border between health and illness remains far more mobile and porous than most of us like to think.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 9:57 am and is filed under books, history, hospitals, institutionalization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post