Customer Reviews

Beyond Bedlam: Contemporary Women Psychiatric Survivors Speak Out

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Beyond Bedlam is a compilation of essays by women who have been in the psychiatric system, and who have been both traumatized and politicized by our experiences. "Mental health" today means massive consumer advertising for drugs....uh, medications. (How many of your friends are on Prozac or one of its sister drugs? Did you now that the use of shock "treatment" has increased dramatically over the past ten years, and is now geared to pregnant and older women?) While the book is no means comprehensive, it will give you a sampling of experiences, perspectives, poetry, and just good writing by women who have survived not only what got us into the "system" in the first place, but also the "help" we received there. There are literally millions of women in America who have at least encountered psychiatry first hand. If you're one of them--and you likely will be at some point in your life--read this book for a different point of view, rather than the drug-company, psychiatric propaganda that's permeated our "Prozac Nation."

This book really helped me when I was struggling to figure out what psychiatric institutionalization had done to me, and how to adjust to the outside world afterwards. It put my experiences into a broader perspective so that I understood that even experiences I had previously thought private were commonplace in the psychiatric system. The writing ranges from poetry to prose, from first-person accounts of the psychiatric system to analyses of how the system itself operates in a broader sense, and everything in between. There is an interesting account of how the ideas, language, and power structures of psychotherapy invaded and weakened the women's liberation movement, alongside poetry that starkly illuminates the experiences of people who still remain, forgotten, possibly by now dead, in the system. This book covers a lot of ground and does it well.

Interesting, but just something I had to read for a class. Some of the recollections are superb, while other went straight over my head.