COMMITTED

A chronicle of survival amid mental and familial turmoil.

From March 1992, when she was 20, to August 1994, Scanlon was a patient at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, sent there after she attempted suicide. In an intimate, unsparing memoir, she recounts her stay in the hospital, the despair that led her there, and her tenuous road to stability. The author’s depression was borne of grief: When she was a child, her mother died of cancer, a loss that her father and siblings never mentioned. Within a year, her father remarried, and his new wife had no sympathy for her stepdaughter’s anguish. “I was on my own with my broken self,” Scanlon writes, terrified “that my life was broken with my mom gone, that no one would ever truly see me or know me again.” She developed an eating disorder that “offered some fleeting sense of control, and it would consume me for many years.” Hating her mother for abandoning her, she “turned that rage back onto myself: I should be dead.” In the “foreign country” that was the hospital, Scanlon was treated by a rolling roster of psychiatrists and was prescribed a cornucopia of medications; in time, she “got better at being a mental patient.” With “complete and naive trust in the authority of the medical establishment,” she wanted “to give them what they wanted”—a sick woman. Although she gained insights into the cause of her problems, she admits, “there is a great gulf between an awareness of a problem and an ability to change.” She found greater insights from narratives by women who themselves confronted madness: Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, among many others. Literature taught her, finally, “to find comfort in the pre-existing condition of being human.”

Astute reflections on fragility, healing, and wholeness.