127 of 154 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Dismayed, January 4, 2009
I was really dismayed by Vincent's depiction of psychiatric drugs in Voluntary Madness, particularly antipsychotic drugs like Seroquel.
As someone whose mental illness (schizoaffective disorder) is and was NOT voluntary, I could tell Vincent that, for me, Seroquel made and continues to make the difference between life and a living death.
The onset of my illness brought loud and threatening hallucinations (voices that threatened to kill me and worse). I was treated with a variety of drugs, the first of which were not very helpful for me.
When my doctor tried giving me Seroquel, however, my life returned to normal as the drug built up in my system. The delusions stopped almost completely, and what voices I heard from then on were and are few and far between. They were also easy to distinguish from real sounds and ceased to be frightening--they became merely annoying and easy to ignore.
While the drug was sedating at first, my body adjusted to it very quickly (it is usually taken at bedtime for this reason). I could also tell Vincent that I certainly DO NOT twitch, drool, or fall asleep during daily activities!
If and when people experience these side effects from drugs, their doctors should withdraw them slowly and gradually while starting them (also slowly and gradually) on new ones. Unless I missed it, Vincent failed to mention that this simple solution to these problems is even possible.
Stopping any psychiatric drug slowly and gradually, under a doctor's supervision, is also an easy way to avoid a painful withdrawal. Vincent demonizes Effexor, for example, as causing withdrawal, but she never mentions that this withdrawal is avoidable.
She also observed that antidepressants and antipsychotics did not seem to work on the real patients on her ward. Well, unlike aspirin, these drugs usually take weeks and even months to build up to a theraputic level in the body. This is something Vincent would have known had she done a bit of research.
Vincent seems intent on making a career of posing as things that she is not. Still, she should have educated herself MUCH better on the subject of severe mental illness and the drugs used to treat it before filling Voluntary Madness with her baseless opinions.
Instead of writing a book about mental illness and its treatments (especially psychopharmacology), Vincent should have read one!
I would like to recommend three books to her or anyone else who wants to read a good first-hand account of mental illness and its treatment:
The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn R. Saks
The Quiet Room by Lori Schiller
An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison
Clarification:
I believe that many psychiatric patients are normal, healthy people who are unhappy for external reasons or going through temporary crises. Vincent, by her own account, seems to fall into this category.
Others, however, have real, biologically based illnesses that (so far) cannot be cured. They can only be treated and the most effective treatment is usually medication, often used with conjunction with therapy. I fall into this category, and I am frustrated that Vincent seems to deny its existence.
Vincent should be glad that she is lucky enough not to need medication. Instead of insisting that since she doesn't need it, no one does, she should have enough humility to refrain from judging what she doesn't understand.
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25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Frankly Dull, January 7, 2009
In Norah Vincent's last book she describes disguising herself and living as a man in every way imaginable for six months. She concludes that book by committing herself to a mental institution. Tough to top? Not for Vincent who turned that experience into the idea for this memoir. She would commit herself into three mental health facilities, and dish out all the dirty details of mental health facilities from the patient perspective.
She easily gets herself committed into her first public health facility and begins to recount colorful stories about her fellow mental patients and scathing criticisms about the hypocrisy of the system. Only Vincent is no stranger to mental demons. She is currently taking Prozac for a history of depression and medication to aide sleep. When she stops taking her medication, she falls into a depression. So before she can commit herself into her next facility, the book then takes a turn. While it still punches at mental health procedure, it mostly becomes the author's personal internal struggle to heal herself. Although the author does make progress and delivers some jewels about modern treatment methods worth considering, the book falls short of the salacious premise originally embarked upon.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
solipsistic, full of factual inaccuracies, but worst, kind of boring, November 8, 2009
I bought this book because I spent three months on "Meriwether Ward 20" as a psychiatry resident, and I thought it would be fun to read something a patient on the unit wrote about it. However, the book turned out to be an poorly-researched anti-psychopharmacology diatribe full of rather egregious, ideologically-driven factual inaccuracies. For example, the author states that the role of excess dopamine in psychosis is entirely unproven, and that the safety and efficacy of D2 receptor antagonists in treating hallucinations and delusions is the subject of "great debate in the scientific community." That's like saying that the role of treponema pallidum in syphilis is entirely unproven, and the safety and efficacy of penicillin in treating syphilis is the subject of great scientific debate. She makes similarly inaccurate statements about the role of serotonin in depression, and perhaps more humorously, attributes the symptoms of other patients' illnesses to the medications used to treat them! Of course, that's what happens when you spend ten days as a tourist on a unit where the average length of stay is almost a month; you're not there long enough to see how well the meds can work and how much better people can get. None of that would even bother me that much if she didn't go around on the unit, encouraging other patients to cheek their meds. Because in a way, that's what her book does--tell the millions of Americans who actually have serious mental illness to stop taking their meds.
While her ignorance of the topic may be her greatest sin as a journalist, her greatest sin as a writer is mainly that the book is not more interesting to read. By focusing so exclusively on herself, she fails to spend enough time describing the fascinating, colorful characters that one encounters on a unit like "Meriwether Ward 20," which would have made the book a lot more entertaining.
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