Praise for LIFE INSIDE “Mindy
Lewis expresses herself with sensitivity and clarity. At the same time,
one enters into her external environment and into her internal self. The
voyage is one of extreme courage and fine, natural introspection; you
feel that her experience resides within you. This book is of equal interest
to patients, health professionals and psychoanalysts, with human-ness,
love and humanity as the only prerequisites. It is a pleasure to give
it my highest recommendation.” “This
is the remarkable adventure of a young woman, misdiagnosed and confined
for more than two years at one of the premier psychiatric teaching hospitals
in the nation, at a time and place of great professional self-confidence.
While her apprentice doctors learned psychotherapy with her, she learned
mostly from her friends and teachers. When she finally got out, she gradually
turned her own experience of living into recovery. A great read, and a
story of healing oneself from which we in the psychotherapy professions
have much to learn.” “When
bad things happen to many people at once—as in bombings, mass incarcerations
of civilians, natural disasters, and the like—the first stories
that reach our ears are usually the dry, if at the same time mind-boggling,
statistics. What brings these horrific events home to us are the reports
of individuals—persons with whom we can identify—who lived
through and survived the events in question. “The Diary of Anne
Frank" tells us more about the Holocaust than the seven-figure numbers.
To comprehend the Gulag, we read Solzhenitsyn's “First Circle.”
The same is true when we try to grasp what it is to be held in the locked
ward of a psychiatric hospital for lengthy periods, especially when the
patients did not even suffer from the condition for which they were involuntarily
committed. In Mindy Lewis’s touching and beautifully written book
we come to live alongside her as she chronicles her more than two-year
stay in mental hospitals—mostly at the New York State Psychiatric
Institute—where she was sent at age 15 for what in retrospect was
best understood as adolescent rebellion and despair, in reaction to a
“broken family” that could not contain the turbulent emotions
she was experiencing. What she did not have was the "schizophrenia"
with which she, and about 500 other young persons were diagnosed in the
1960s and 70s. (Only one in six merited this diagnosis by current standards).
Mindy Lewis’s book reads like a Bildungsroman, as she progresses
over the years from bewilderment and anger, finally to compassion and
forgiveness. As one of the therapists who was there at the hospital 30
years ago when the author was there, I can attest that mental health professionals
of all disciplines have much to learn from gifted persons, who had once
been gifted patients, like Ms. Lewis.”
“In
lyrical, honestlanguage, a painter describes her adolescence in a New
York psychiatric hospital…Complex, chilling, luminous: not one false
step.” "Life
Inside deftly documents a reality many prefer not to face: that moments
of innocent misstep can result in life-shattering, formative, profound
descents. Lewis's prose is fueled by narrative power derived from the
honoring of complexity, the love of language itself, and from the ultimately
irrepressible self."
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