Some people write for fun, some for profit. Some can twist words, others can couple them with infinite beauty. Some try to bedazzle with technique or stun you with ideas. Others are merely seeking the truth, or some truth, pursuing it, hoping it will ring out and change the world.

And there are those who find writing therapeutic, using it to learn something about themselves, to purge memories or other trauma, to understand childhood. When Mindy Lewis’s book, Life Inside, first came to my office, something about it was intriguing and I carried it around for a couple of days, intending to delve further. When she called we began talking and the lure became apparent. She was a child of the 1960s in Manhattan, a baby boomer, getting off the train at Central Park instead of going to school, wandering through the park reading poetry, dropping acid.

"There was this whole community in the park of kids who were truant from school it was definitely a culture, there were kids wandering around in renaissance clothing reading poetry, listening to Dylan and Hendrix. There was an atmosphere of nihilism and protest," she says, on the phone.

Remember those days? If you do, you know that the description fit lots of kids, and all kinds of fates awaited them. We drove our Depression era, World War II veteran, suburban Levittown dwelling parents crazy, cause they were different–no, it was us who were different, looking at things through a new filter, not accepting the old ways.

How many times did a distraught parent cry out in mock despair: "I’m going to have you committed, put you in a mental institution!" Well, that’s what happened to Mindy Lewis.

"It was a very poetic thing for an artistic kid to be different, you know you're listening to Dylan, the war was going on. It was not a bad thing to not be part of the world. It was almost like a positive value. It seemed like to be kind of a protest, to feel the world's pain."

Sure, like a lot of kids.

"What happened was that my mother remarried when I was 11 and my stepfather was into Freudian psychoanalysis. They sent me to a psychiatrist at 14. The atmosphere at home was very fraught. I was non-verbal. I was the kind of kid who was filled with strong emotion and didn't know how to express myself verbally for a while. I rebelled extra hard because my mother and I were very symbiotic and I needed to push her away extra hard and my mother didnít know how to handle it. I was her little girl then I was a teenage hellion. Then I stopped going to school."

But Lewis’s nightmare was just beginning. Her parents sent her to Manhattan State Hospital where she ended up being confined for 28 months, from Dec. 6, 1967, until she turned 18 years old in April, 1970.

"They didn’t know what to do with me, and my psychiatrist thought I’d try suicide. He found a state hospital but it was a teaching hospital, a cutting edge place. This particular hospital was free and would only take me and other adolescents. [But] they didn’t want parents to be able to sign us out, didn't want parents to intervene. My mother had to press charges in family court and make me ward of the state on court remand."

Lewis couldn’t be signed out until she reached adult status.

"I was stuck there until I was 18 or they decided to discharge me. This was the case for the others in the coed ward. We were just stuck on the ward. If they suspected you'd run away, you'd be on EO (elopement observation). I spent most of my time there in pajamas," she says. "We were either raising hell experimenting sexually, taking drugs, or trying to escape. Bored, locked up, sitting around smoking cigarettes. Once I was in there my attitude was "fuck you!" alternating with despair at being lost, at being doomed, that I had really screwed up my life. I thought I was bad, a lost soul, doomed. I thought that I was crazy after a while."

In August, 1999, Lewis came to Byrdcliffe for a three-and-a-half week session, carrying her hospital records, to begin her book, which she now describes as "a day by day blow by blow description of the mischievous deeds and dirty doings of the adolescents on the hospital ward where I was confined for 28 months in 1967."

There is unbelievable ache in this book. The downward spiral once Lewis was inside the institution was unmistakable.

"At that time, the approach was heavily Freudian, so that patients were treated as specimens to be observed, and our doctors inaccessibly distant. In an atmosphere that defined us as mentally ill, what we adolescents really needed to hear was that we were okay. Also, the hospital was largely funded by research grants from pharmaceutical companies, so most patients were heavily medicated."

The psychiatrists who treated the patients were usually second-year residents.

"They were relatively inexperienced. Our psychiatrists were first- and second-year medical residents. Basically they were still in school. They were trying to impress their supervisors and learn their pseudo-science. My first psychiatrist inside the hospital later confessed to me that the year I was his patient was his first experience of seeing patients, as a second year resident."

The second half of the book has Lewis coping with what was, after she got out of the hospital on turning 18.

"In retrospect, that was the person I was supposed to be. I do live in my head, I do need to be in nature, I'm an artist and now a writer. The message I was getting was it was not OK to be who I am. I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere. I’ve been back in touch with the psychiatrist I saw when I was 14, and he has apologized to me. Because I was non-verbal, he says he didn’t know what to do with me. I was burning myself with cigarettes, had done the obligatory suicide attempt with aspirin. They were afraid for me. Back then they didn’t have a diagnosis of social anxiety disorder. But what he’s learned about that since then is that it’s often well behaved kids who start to experience anxiety and then they assume they’re crazy."

The book is fascinating, difficult, funny at times, and always read with a sort of suppressed sense of horror, a kind of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest dream of how total absurdity becomes a sane person's daily reality.

"Writing this book it the most amazing kind of alchemy and affirmation because it's taken the most difficult and most painful experiences of my life and transformed them into something positive that I have to share with other people. I had kept this a secret because I was ashamed of it, and even though I had developed other aspects of my life–I’m a painter, I’m healthy, I have wonderful friends–I was carrying my hospital experience around with me like this thing, this anger. Writing this book had been transforming. I’ve forgiven my mother, we’re closer than we've ever been. She’s been very supportive. It’s given me a broader view. This was the book that really needed to get written. Maybe it can help parents of adolescent kids."

–Brian Hollander