She decided to get healthy and to study the effect of treatment on the depressed and insane "in the bin," as she calls it. Out of this raw and overwhelming experience came the idea for her next book. On the advice of her psychologist she committed herself to a mental institution.
Suffering from severe depression after her eighteen months living disguised as a man, Vincent felt she was a danger to herself. In analysing the peculiar, sometimes damaging and occasionally transformative relationships between patients and their caregivers, her consummate, fearless and darkly funny reportage makes for riveting reading.Norah Vincent's New York Times bestselling book, Self-Made Man, ended on a harrowing note.
She demonstrates the power of common sense and human connection: how much better a patient can feel when treated like a person and not a petri dish. In Voluntary Madness, Norah Vincent takes a fearless and unprecedented view of mental health care u from the inside out. Then to Mobius, and a Buddhist-inspired brand of healing, where Norah is forced to plunge deep into her emotional past, and swim through the psycho-babble to some unexpected conclusions. Cut to the calming green carpet of St Lukes: plenty of 'loonies' here too of course but Norah is taken aback when her doctor allows her to reduce her medication, have a room of her own and a regular jog in the park. There Norah confronts the boredom and babbling of an underfunded facility: a place where medication is a process of containment: its purpose to make life easier for the rest of us, not the patients themselves. Her journey starts in a huge inner city hospital where most patients are 'repeats', often poor and dispossessed. As a result of this traumatic experience Norah came out resolved to go back undercover to report on a range of mental institutions u three difficult, pressurized and very different environments u and to experience first hand their effect on the body and mind. Norah Vincent has always suffered from depression but at the end of a book project that required her to spend eighteen months disguised as a man she felt that she was a danger to herself and was committed to a 'loony bin'.
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