THE CHAIR AND THE VALLEY

A once-institutionalized psychiatric patient exposes a flawed, corrupt system.

Now in his early 50s, Lyon, a backpacking guide and instructor, was an ordinary kid, torn between divorced parents who lived in different states and didn’t know what to do with him. “My life wasn’t perfect. I still missed California,” he writes. “But settling in Dallas was better than being bounced from house to house like an unwanted package.” His parents’ solution was to move the understandably disaffected kid into a psychiatric facility for a few weeks, only to watch as a few weeks turned into a year. As the author notes, the standard mode of treatment was to force the teenager to sit in a chair day in and day out, the better to ponder the error of his youthful ways. Lyon serves up sharp portraits of his wardens, from the bureaucratic head who placed him in the worst unit in the place to the supposed therapist who imposed one meaningless punishment after another. Placed in a halfway house, he confronted what passed for the real world—and eventually won a legal judgment for psychiatric malpractice, a short-lived victory that preceded a series of spirit-killing defeats. “I hated being the poster boy for psychiatry gone wrong,” he writes; still, he did much to expose that malfeasance then, just as he does in these well-considered pages. One feels for Lyon as he describes coping with inconceivably terrible loss. Years later, he learned the true, and truly indefensible, reason for his having been confined in the first place. The author, who went on to become an outdoor guide, is also gracious about his difficult life, writing, meaningfully, “today is a very different place than I ever could have imagined.”

A heartfelt memoir and an urgent demand for higher standards of juvenile mental health care.