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A review by alexandriaslibrary
Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen by Suzanne Scanlon
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
No words! Just the awe of seeing your most inner thoughts reflected back to you.
Scanlon does so much in 350 pages. Her personal tragedies, the history of women institutionalized and “crazy” women artists. Her long-term institutionalization during college at the end of the era of long-term psychiatric care. The performance of “sickness” and how you choose to live
“We felt helpless, and yet this wasn't linked to the growing inequality and social isolation of the 1980s postwelfare state. The aggressive backlash to the gains of feminism and the civil rights movements of the sixties. We needed help and felt shame for asking. We had failed in some sense of an American individualist imperative. We had an obligation to recover. The narrative of progression. This was not only for the medical-pharmaceutical establishment which required our before and after stories, but also for a culture that locates mental illness in the self and not the society. If it doesn't quite work this way, there was no acknowledgment of that. There weren't stories of the ones who don't recover, or get better and worse over and over again.”
Scanlon does so much in 350 pages. Her personal tragedies, the history of women institutionalized and “crazy” women artists. Her long-term institutionalization during college at the end of the era of long-term psychiatric care. The performance of “sickness” and how you choose to live
“We felt helpless, and yet this wasn't linked to the growing inequality and social isolation of the 1980s postwelfare state. The aggressive backlash to the gains of feminism and the civil rights movements of the sixties. We needed help and felt shame for asking. We had failed in some sense of an American individualist imperative. We had an obligation to recover. The narrative of progression. This was not only for the medical-pharmaceutical establishment which required our before and after stories, but also for a culture that locates mental illness in the self and not the society. If it doesn't quite work this way, there was no acknowledgment of that. There weren't stories of the ones who don't recover, or get better and worse over and over again.”