This is a fascinating true story with a happy ending. I couldn't put it down and read it through the very day it came.

At the age of 25, on her way to confront her ex-fiance, the author was in a car accident and afterwards began acting irrationally. She ended up in a mental hospital, where she tried in vain to convince the staff that she was not insane. She was forced to submit to unwanted medication, strip searches, and physical abuse. She kept insisting that her problems were physical, but no one believed her. Nevertheless, she put up a good fight for her rights; you feel what a strong person she really was, in spite of her mental confusion. Finally, one doctor learned of her symptoms and tests not done before showed that she had a rare brain tumor, which was treated, and she was at last free to go home and resume normal life.

Although I couldn't help feeling great indignation reading about some of the mean or stupid staff who mistreated her, as a whole, her story is empowering, because she WINS!

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It was a good book, well written. May have been better if she had waited to have more distance before she wrote it.

The facility she was in was not a "snake pit". She lost some of her rights, which is terrible, but it was more infantilization to protect her from herself (she was perceived to be and acting psychotic) than abuse.

She was in an upper class psych hospital where the doctors knew their patients and did their best to help them. She was misdiagnosed, but not through malice or neglect, but through the lack of neurological knowledge of the 80s.

By the end of the book Ms. Deitrick comes off somewhat unlikeable because of her immaturity. For example she and her friend have a party where she stomps ice cream bars all over the floor of the common room. I wondered how often state hospital patients get ice cream bars and if they would waste them so childishly.

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good story

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