Iâm Mona Simpson, the author of seven novels. I grew up with a mentally ill parent who struggled to support me, her only child, as a single mother. I saw firsthand the toll living in the world cost her. One of my first experiences of adulthood was a sense of relief in discovering that staying above water was manageable, even easy. Walking home from my first real job, seeing all the other peopleâs backs and legs hurry ahead of me, I liked being one of the many. I wondered if my mother could have ever felt that ease if there had been an alternative.
I found myself returning to the resonant images again and again. The book presents pictures of a young manâs mother throughout her life before her mental illness, and with it, and includes some bits of narrative, letters from her and from his father.
These exerpts allowed me to construct the story of a familyâs tragedy, the evolution of a beautiful young woman into someone else, someone who was still, nevertheless, painfully loved. One of the typewritten paragraphs begins, âRight after you were born, your mother believed she had fallen in love with someone else.â
I felt the young photographerâs mission to understand and hold his love for his imperfect parents driving the book. It was not put together for me, the reader, but out of a driving necessity. We are nevertheless allowed to witness the young manâs struggle and evolution.
Breaking down the structure of the photograph as truth and the book as narrative, Joshua Lutz's second monograph, HESITATING BEAUTY, it is an intimate portrait unlike other photographic models. Rethinking how photographs and text can function, Lutz blends family archives, interviews and letters with his own photographic practice seamlessly into a precious, fictitious experience of a life and family consumed by mental illness. Instead of showing us what it looks like, HESITATING BEAUTY is able to play with our own conceptions of reality to show us what it feels like.
Joshua Lutz: ""Holding on so tightly to what I believedâŠ
In 1995, in the attic of a decommissioned mental hospital in New York State, a curator of New York State Museum, a local volunteer, a psychiatrist/ documentarian, and a photographer found a trove of suitcases, doctorâs bags, steamer trunks with Chinese motif, housekeys, photographs, earrings, belts, upright ladies Saratoga trunks (âso named because they could hold enough clothes for an entire summer season in the resort town of Saratoga Springs.")
The researchers ventured further into the hospital's now vacant sites, an abandoned bowling alley, and its burial grounds. Finally, they obtained permission to get a few hours with the medical records, which were stored in an abandoned hospital building contaminated with asbestos and lead, requiring them to don protective gear and booties.
Their hope was to bring the forgotten patients whoâd spent years in the institution back to life. This book and its intricate details haunted me. There are so many lost stories and lives that were forgotten that nevertheless leave bits of their essence behind for the patient resurrectors.
"The Lives They Left Behind is a deeply moving testament to the human side of mental illness, and of the narrow margin which so often separates the sane from the mad. It is a remarkable portrait, too, of the life of a psychiatric asylum--the sort of community in which, for better and for worse, hundreds of thousands of people lived out their lives. Darby Penney and Peter Stastny's careful historical (almost archaeological) and biographical reconstructions give us unique insight into these lives which would otherwise be lost and, indeed, unimaginable to the rest of us." --Oliver Sacks "Fascinating...The haunting thingâŠ
Oliver Sackâs forward to this book, which was first published as The Lost Virtues of the Asylum, stopped me cold when I first read it. It was a revelation and started my mind turning. I read the piece dozens of times and then found the source materials Sacks quoted from and read those books, too.
I came of age during the era of One Flew Over the Cuckooâs Nest, and it was a long unwinding to begin to consider that an institution, a state institution on the order of a large mental health hospital, could do good. But Iâd grown up with a mentally ill parent who struggled to survive and bring me up safely. I saw firsthand the toll our life took on her. I began to tamper with my assumption that sheâd been better off in the harrying world.
The photographs by Alexander Payne are haunting. The old abandoned hospitals, which held whole civilizations, cultures, so many dedicated lives and ideals, ârepurposedâ and forgotten.
Powerful photographs of the grand exteriors and crumbling interiors of America's abandoned state mental hospitals.
For more than half the nation's history, vast mental hospitals were a prominent feature of the American landscape. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, over 250 institutions for the insane were built throughout the United States; by 1948, they housed more than a half million patients. The blueprint for these hospitals was set by Pennsylvania hospital superintendant Thomas Story Kirkbride: a central administration building flanked symmetrically by pavilions and surrounded by lavish grounds with pastoral vistas. Kirkbride and others believed that well-designed buildingsâŠ
This is the Horatio Alger story for talented young women who develop schizophrenia. Elyn Saks, a law professor at USC, tells a story of descent into a kind of madness that has a truly happy ending. Not the kind of happy ending literary novels offer us, in which contentment is laced with sadness. Elyn conquers her demons like a superhero.
Elyn Saks is Professor of Law and Psychiatry at University of Southern California Law School. She's the author of several books. Happily married. And - a schizophrenic. Saks lifts the veil on schizophrenia with her startling and honest account of how she learned to live with this debilitating disease. With a coolly clear, measured tone she talks about her condition, the stigma attached and the deadening effects of medication. Her controlled narrative is disrupted by interjections from the part of her mind she has learned to suppress. Delusions, hallucinations and threatening voices cut into her reality and Saks, in aâŠ
This is a book in which I have underlines on almost every page. Itâs the story of the development of Psychiatry â the whole field â in the United States; in this case, there really is a story. One man, Thomas Kirkbride, the superintendent of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, largely determined the course of how we first thought about and treated mental illness in America. His vision became the template for the large state institutions erected according to his model.
Steeped in the ideals of the European protocol of âmoral treatment,â Kirkbride believed to the end that mental illness could be cured with nature, safe containment, music, art, reading, good food, and a slowed-down, kinder life.Â
The Art of Asylum-Keeping is a social history of medical practice in a private nineteenth-century asylum, the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane in Philadelphia. It recreates everyday life in the asylum and explores its social, as well as its scientific, legitimation.
It is a novel about a single motherâs collapse and the fate of her family after she enters a California State hospital in the 1970s; a story of one family trying to navigate the crisis of their lives, a crisis many know firsthand in their own families or in those of their neighbors. After Diane Aziz drives her oldest son, Walter, to college at UC Berkeley, she falls into a deep depression. When she enters a state hospital, her closest friend tries to keep the children safe and their motherâs dreams for them alive.
A resonant novel about family and duty and the attendant struggles that come when a parent falls ill, Commitment honors the spirit of fragile, imperfect mothers and the under-chronicled significance of friends in determining the lives of our children left on their own.
