Vincent herself is an intriguing individual who takes her career of immersion journalism to its furthest reaches. Having experienced depression and hospitalization herself, she decides to check herself into three mental-health facilities in turn to observe various treatment modalities. Some of her observations - the indifferent caregivers at a large public hospital for example - are heartbreaking; others reveal the humor and good-heartedness of even those patients who are most ill. Through all run the themes of insurance bureaucracy, over-medication and Vincent's ultimate belief that what matters most is the individual's own determination to be well. In this she herself succeeds, but patients with severe mental illnesses may be unable to do so. While the book is enlightening, Vincent comes across as a bit self-indulgent.

New and Noteworthy RC464.V56 A3 2008

I wasn't particularly fond of the writing style, but enjoyed reading the author's experiences. I hope I'm never committed to a state mental institution. ( )

I really enjoyed the memoir-ish aspects of Voluntary Madness, but Vincent’s attempts to expose “the state of mental healthcare in America” fall flat because they are nothing new. Readers who are entirely unfamiliar with mental health treatment will surely learn something from Vincent’s experience, but for readers who have taken even an introductory psychology course, the ideas presented in Voluntary Madness will be nothing new.

Read my full review at The Book Lady's Blog. ( )

This is a very good book, though not what you might expect. At first it looks like it's going to be an undercover reporter's expose, a normal person faking crazy so the rest of us can see how our benighted brethren live. But eventually it turns out that she's not really faking, she needs help, and more than she knows.

As with her last book, 'Self-Made Man', this is an inadvertent coming-of-age story. The journalistic narrative is gradually displaced by her struggle for self-knowledge, and in the process she discovers all kinds of things that many people already know, in this case that interpersonal psychotherapy -- the kind that doesn't need a prescription pad -- actually works.

I hasten to add that this isn't the sentimental Hollywood version. She is wonderfully dry-eyed and skeptical, and acquires not pat solutions, but the logical means for navigating past the twin whirlpools of rage and despair.

Thus her story is essentially universal. Everyone struggles with these things from time to time, and her presentation if free of the self-pity and/or glibness that are endemic to the this sort of story. It's not Thomas Szasz, nor is it Oliver Sacks, but it's still a useful and necessary book for times like ours, when psychopharmacology (and the pseudo-scientific 'cost-benefit' analysis that enthrones it) has not merely eclipsed the traditional talking cure but nearly driven it into hiding. ( )