Kate Millett (1990) The Loony Bin Trip.

Posted by celticman on Sat, 15 Feb 2014

Kate Millett wrote The Loony Bin Trip at the rue de Seine between 1982 and 1985. She questioned whether ‘they were right after all. My own mind was too dangerous.’ They are the medical establishment, the pharmaceutical companies, the police, the government, all the outsiders.   But what makes it tragic was the collusion of all the insiders too. She follows in the path of R.D Laing Madness comes from the family and Thomas Szasz, madness is manufactured. There is no clinical proof that madness exists. The brain of a madman or woman has the same weight and looks the same as that of those that are not classified in such a way. What there can be no doubt about are the ravages of the drugs used to control madness. Tardive dyskinesia, for example, makes a young person old. It gives them the twitches and tremors of the possessed. It is also called pseudo Parkinson disease. In First World War terms these are the big guns shooting into the no man’s land of the brain and the medical establishment concluding that victory will be imminent. Millett is on lithium when the book opens and she is on lithium when the book ends-- then she’s clean, but she doesn’t tell anyone until she’s sure she’s clean. The shameful secret is that she had to keep it a secret. For just as King Lear is King in the first act and King in the last (or is he?) the landscape and everyone in it has changed. A country has been invaded. Autonomy means literally self rule. When Millett first decides she no longer want to keep taking lithium because, among other things, it gives her diarrhoea and makes her hands tremble, it seems no big deal. She tells her lover Kate. They are trying to establish a women’s artist colony and a working farm in Poughkeepsie, but the apprentices find out, as does her mother, her sisters and all her friends. They are unequivocal that she needs to be saved from herself and incarcerated until she gets better and sees sense. In the second act Millet flees to Ireland. Here she is incarcerated, kept prisoner for her own good and fed pharmaceutical toxins to make her more docile, for this is an issue of control. She has lost her autonomy. She has lost the right to decide what to put into her body. She has lost her liberty and she is witness to thousands of other women (and men) who are similarly kept captive in mind and body.   What she has not lost is her reason. In the third act she escapes back to New York, but an inability to write makes her lose her purpose, her sense of self and her reason for being. What had been lost can be found. The Loony Bin Trip is a manifesto for those left behind.

Comments

Submitted by Ray Schaufeld on

Yes! The book is the author's lived experience and a truly great read. You write about it very well      Elsie

Submitted by celticman on

I'm glad you think I write about it well Elsie, because I tried to be fair to the book, but I don't agree that madness is a social construct. I think there should be more, not less places for those that need the shelter of asylum, as care in the community is a fool's game in which everyone one plays and everyone loses. Certainly we shouldn't go back to the mass incarcerations of the sixties and seventies, but we do need safe places for people that find it too difficult to find time and space for recovery. The problem is cost. As Millett was very aware a bed can be a bed for life.  Institutionalisation is not the answer.

 

Submitted by Ray Schaufeld on

In my experience madness is something that happens and it makes sense for people to get looked after when they lose the facts of what they are doing. I have a distinct memory of leaving home 6 years ago and of thinking it was the dawn of the day when it was nightfall and after muddling around on local busses arriving in Newton Abbot which I was sure was Plymouth and booking into a B&B. I had  completely forgotten that I had left my 10 year old daughter alone in our flat. I demanded hospitalisation 2 days later when I returned to Exmouth as I felt that the initial offer of a visiting support worker was not enough. I got the inpatient treatment I asked for in my local National Health psychiatric unit and I felt that the standard of care given to me was good. My daughter after a week with a friend of mine,(who afterwards wanted nothing to do with me and even cut me dead in the pub where three of us ladies used to enjoy going the acoustic music night),was collected and looked after for seven weeks by her aunt in Finchley.

Where I think it all goes wrong is when people are discharged from hospital. Well enough to be out in the community, not deemed well enough by the powers that be to do a job with any responsibility, or to decide for ourselves on what is the correct dosage of medication we need  to take in order to stay out of hospital - yeh just dope us up to the gills to line the pockets of the drug manufacturers and their pharmaceutical sales reps and if we have any aspiration other than complete second class citizenry than obviously this is 'part of our illness' and must show a total lack of self-awareness.

Easy to be cynical and on a more positive note I do write for an online site called Recovery Devon which is about mental health. Initially they had artworks in their Creative Cafe and personal stories with a 250 word limit written from the point of view of mental health recovery( Pretty big ask this, to keep it so brief and mine has a sort of 'snapshot' quality.)I asked 'can we have poetry too' and 'can we have a space to post book reviews' and the answer to both has been 'yes'.

I'm not proud -anything to get read!

Submitted by VeraClark on

Beautifully written and carefully considered, Celt. I don't agree that madness is a social construct either. I think it's as real as you and I and Elsie are, and it's a crying shame that sanctuary has been pulled on the basis of budget. Social constructs of mental health are now very conveniently endorsed by community care - mental capacity, human rights - it all stacks up nicely with no money in the pot. I'm not suggesting the legal framework is unethical, because it's obviously not and institutionalisation isn't an answer but I firmly believe refuge should still be an option.

 

Submitted by VeraClark on

Elsie, you're bang on the nail. It's discharge that's fraught with high risk, from full care to no care. And diagnosis is always another game of slippery fish. Would love to see your work on Recovery Devon and shame shame shame on the friend that cut you dead. 

 

Submitted by Ray Schaufeld on

Well Vera it's easy to log in - you simply Google Welcome to Recovery Devon. However everything that is in the Creative Cafe (the poetry is under my Abc name  and my book reviews are under my birth certificate name) is also here on Abctales, there is simply less of it on Recovery Devon.This is because I do not want to swamp the site with my own material  I want  the poetry section in particular to take off for everyone out there first.The one piece which you will find there and not here is 'Elsie's story' adjacent to my photo of Saffron my superstar cat!

Submitted by VeraClark on

I will take a look - thanks very much, Elsie.

 

Submitted by celticman on

I want a superstar cat!

 

Submitted by Ray Schaufeld on

Saffie's mine! Although there are times when the attention-seeking little hussy' gets in my way' when I am reading or on the computer when I think 'hmm - slow boat to Glasgow for you madam how about it' I daresay for her it's all simply doing it her way.

Another 2nd stage feminist who went through mental health hell is Shulamith Firestone. Younger than most of the writers and thinkers of that era, her book 'the Dialectic of Sex' was published  when she was 25.

Hey what is it with feminism? Surely it's supposed to make women well and get our heads straight. I should know I've been into it since 1980 when I joined my first women's collective. Ah, yes..

Be that as it may,Shulamith's Firestone's book of short narratives  Airless Spaces is harshly gripping. The style is personal. local to the New York environment, bleak and terse. On reading it I was reminded of James Kelman's short story book Greyhound for Breakfast. Different city, similar gritty dredging of a human state of often close to nihilistic poverty.

Submitted by celticman on

Well, what about an adaptation of Kelman's Saffie for Breakfast.

 

Submitted by VeraClark on

And a Morrison's crumpet or three.

 

Submitted by Ray Schaufeld on

!!!surprise