The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic (edition 2009)

Terribly disappointing because it could have been wonderful, but instead suffers from repetitive, barely-restrained vitriol. The book's ostensible focus is on reconstructing, from suitcases left in the attic, the lives of people who were patients at a residential psychiatric hospital. This is an interesting proposition, but it is not pursued hermeneutically or adequately. The problem is not that the authors have a point to make and use the case studies to support it. Rather, they are not sufficiently up-front about their agenda and present a veneer of scientific inquiry to convey their neutrality. However, they are not neutral, and their thesis is ill-served by not being explicitly described.

An otherwise-interesting topic is marred by heavy negative over-generalization, failure to stick to the topic it proposes to present, and failure to separate the issue of type and quality of care from the question of what to do when a person is unable to manage in society. Making the book worse is poor editing, both in terms of sometimes-confusing organization and flow, and unclear and repetitive statements. Some important information and explanation are also missing (for example, whose hands are holding the people's possessions in the photos, and is it journalistically suspect to have used hands that appear to match the person's demographics?). Another area that seems deceptive and detracts significantly is the authors' contradictory attitude about the patients' privacy. On the publishing information page, they report that they would have used patients' names but for privacy laws. I can understand this regret; my dissertation study participants wanted me to use their names and I was not permitted to do so. However, the authors' desire to use names stems from their own wishes, not their subjects', as their subjects are dead. Presumably if the patients' relatives had given permission, the authors could have used the patients' names (since the survivors hold the decedents' privilege). It is possible that the patients would not have wanted their names used. In this light, the authors' use of people's first names, full-face photos, and potentially identifying information seems both coy and unethical, as well as unnecessary and provocative. Who is it who was stripped of their autonomy and used for other people's ends by the bad legal/medical/psychiatric abusers? And whose privacy is abrogated by the authors, for their own purposes? Hmm.

I support the authors' contentions that psychiatry has been used as an instrument of social control and management, that patients were and are pathologized and disbelieved, and that they often receive inadequate care, especially in public institutions. This is widely documented and more effectively demonstrated elsewhere, though it bears repeating. The authors could have used this book more effectively for this purpose had they constrained their editorializing and not engaged in multiple instances of extreme and overgeneralized assertions. For example, they don't give any examples of people who they think need any kind of psychiatric intervention, yet also condemn the state and psychiatric/medical profession for not providing other services. Perhaps most egregiously problematic, they condemn the objectification of the patients and the loss of their complexity and humanity, yet by only portraying the parts of patients' histories that support the authors' perspective, they also treat the patients as objects that serve the authors' ends. ( )

New York's Willard State Hospital had many suitcases stored in the attic when it closed the doors permanently. This non-fiction work offers the disturbing reality of mental patient treatment & lack of intake interviewing procedures during the hospital's period of operation.

This book is absolutely horrifying. It is simply disgusting how terribly mental patients were treated, and how people who really shouldn't have been classified as mentally disturbed or disabled were locked up without any recourse. The things passing for treatment really have no relation to the word, as this book shows many people were locked up for life. It's so sad to think of the wasted lives. ( )

This is a very difficult book to read because it shows the damage that can be done to people who have no resources to fight for themselves. Penney's theory is that when mental institutions became more humane, more people were committed to them. Add this fact to the eugenics movement which postulated that only the best sort of people should be encouraged to reproduce and mental institution populations were greatly increased so that mentally ill or mentally "defective" people could be removed from society for their reproductive lives. As the population of mental institutions grew larger the growth actually helped fuel its own increase because the patients themselves were used as free labor to perform the menial work necessitated to keep the institutions functioning. There were no psychopharmaceuticals for most of the time Willard State hospital was in operation. Essentially, the patients got no mental health care at all. They were observed at intervals but they were seldom released from custody because of their evaluations. Those who could work were encouraged to do so, those who couldn't or wouldn't just sat, for years and years and years. When early psychopharmaceuticals were introduced they were give to people long after the fact that they were shown to cause tardive dyskinesia. Electroconvulsive therapy was used as a form of patient control.

Lastly Penney shows how the modern method of dealing with mental illness is far from optimal. Hospitals have closed, and those who can't care for themselves have either become homeless or incarcerated or relegated to "adult care homes" that frequently offer as little care as Willard did. Peer therapy and interaction has been shown to be effective but is used far too infrequently in he age of little respect or finances to care for people facing mental health challenges. ( )

Mentioned on Nancy White's thread. Oh, my, but this is such a disturbing book. When Willard hospital, in upstate New York, closed in 1995, hundreds of suitcases were found in an attic. The author researched ten suitcases and chronicled the lives of those who were institutionalized.

This is excellently written not only because it studies the lives of those institutionalized, but in addition, there is in depth research regarding mental health systems in the United States and treatment of those who did not fit into a specific mold and were deemed "crazy."

Highly recommended! ( )