BOOK REVIEW -- In Silence I Speak, by Mary Elizabeth Van Pelt
Memoirs written by mad people - describing what it's like to wrestle with the emotional and cognitive disturbances we call "mental illness", or the experiences with psychiatric treatment, or the associated stigma and the sense of having become something unmentionable - seldom cover the entire territory.
There are those books that invite us along for a glimpse of the descent into madness, such as Hannah Green's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden; there are the ones that focus more on what it's like to need help so badly and to instead be subjected to the grim and harsh realities of psychiatric incarceration, such as Janet Gotkin's Too Much Anger, Too Many Tears or Susannah Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted.
Then there are the more militant books written more as condemnations of psychiatric oppression, like Leonard Roy Frank's "The Frank Papers" from back in the Madness Network News days, or Huey Freeman's Judge, Jury & Executioner. Sometimes the latter folks include a description of The Movement - mad people's liberation, the consumers and survivors and ex-patients banding together both to fight for our rights and to be the support network and therapeutic safety net that the psychiatric system has been unable to provide us - such as you find in Kate Millet's The Loony Bin Trip or Judi Chamberlin's On Our Own.
A lot of the militant / movement-oriented stories do not come from people who were seeking or needing help, but just had it imposed on them anyway whether they liked it or not. So, as you might expect, there's a lot of focus on the right to say "no" and be left in peace. My own writings have mostly fallen into this category.
Mary Elizabeth Van Pelt's 2010 book In Silence I Speak: My Journey Through Madness provides one of the less common testimonies, the story of a person who fell down into the pit of real mental and emotional turmoil and truly needed help, but for whom the help was at best a mixed bag until she found community and connectedness with others who were in the same boat...and from there, became acquainted with the movement and increasingly committed to the user-run self-help model for alternative therapy.
Hers is as fervent a callout to the movement and its ideals as anything written by the militant leave-us-alone contingent. Of particular interest, she testifies to what it's like to work in the mental health system as a person who is known to have a psychiatric diagnosis herself. The attitudes and expectations, the overt double standards, these all paint a graphic picture of how the professionals in the psychiatric system tend to view us: as very different from themselves, as impaired people, as people of a different caste whom one would not invite to a dinner with one's real colleagues, as people who are automatically disqualified from being on the actual staff because we can't have such people with such ruined minds working here, as people whose time and energy has no intrinsic worth, so their contributions need not be compensated.
In Silence I Speak is a slim volume that packs a lot into just 128 pages. Van Pelt recapitulates her experience of an aspect of the situation and then moves on to another subtopic. Some sections were definitely richer, more fleshed out and punchier than others, and these are the places where In Silence I Speak is at its best. The sense of disorientation and being unplugged and lost is well-provided in "Psychiatric Interlude"; and the new hopes arising from mutual support and connection are very evocative in "A Time of Growth and Change". She details the sense of betrayal and her frustration with the obliviousness of her professional colleagues in "Flying Beyond Institutional Walls" and "Beyond the World of Madness".
The thinnest and most perfunctory sections of the book are the early ones describing her initial descent into dysfunctional patterns. Whether out of a reluctance to relinquish her remaining privacy or, as she hints, because it's still a painful place to go back to and relive long enough to capture on paper, we aren't given a really visceral sense of what was happening to her and how it felt.
But in the emergence into the peer support and psychiatric rights community, her tale is compelling, in large part because it is so effectively prefaced by her description of what it was like to try to provide those kinds of services and be a participant and colleague within the medical-model version that the peer services are an alternative to.
Mary Elizabeth Van Pelt. In Silence I Speak: My Journey Through Madness. Paperback and Kindle editions. Albuquerque NM: Mercury Heartlink 2010
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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My third book is deep in second draft, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
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There are those books that invite us along for a glimpse of the descent into madness, such as Hannah Green's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden; there are the ones that focus more on what it's like to need help so badly and to instead be subjected to the grim and harsh realities of psychiatric incarceration, such as Janet Gotkin's Too Much Anger, Too Many Tears or Susannah Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted.
Then there are the more militant books written more as condemnations of psychiatric oppression, like Leonard Roy Frank's "The Frank Papers" from back in the Madness Network News days, or Huey Freeman's Judge, Jury & Executioner. Sometimes the latter folks include a description of The Movement - mad people's liberation, the consumers and survivors and ex-patients banding together both to fight for our rights and to be the support network and therapeutic safety net that the psychiatric system has been unable to provide us - such as you find in Kate Millet's The Loony Bin Trip or Judi Chamberlin's On Our Own.
A lot of the militant / movement-oriented stories do not come from people who were seeking or needing help, but just had it imposed on them anyway whether they liked it or not. So, as you might expect, there's a lot of focus on the right to say "no" and be left in peace. My own writings have mostly fallen into this category.
Mary Elizabeth Van Pelt's 2010 book In Silence I Speak: My Journey Through Madness provides one of the less common testimonies, the story of a person who fell down into the pit of real mental and emotional turmoil and truly needed help, but for whom the help was at best a mixed bag until she found community and connectedness with others who were in the same boat...and from there, became acquainted with the movement and increasingly committed to the user-run self-help model for alternative therapy.
Hers is as fervent a callout to the movement and its ideals as anything written by the militant leave-us-alone contingent. Of particular interest, she testifies to what it's like to work in the mental health system as a person who is known to have a psychiatric diagnosis herself. The attitudes and expectations, the overt double standards, these all paint a graphic picture of how the professionals in the psychiatric system tend to view us: as very different from themselves, as impaired people, as people of a different caste whom one would not invite to a dinner with one's real colleagues, as people who are automatically disqualified from being on the actual staff because we can't have such people with such ruined minds working here, as people whose time and energy has no intrinsic worth, so their contributions need not be compensated.
In Silence I Speak is a slim volume that packs a lot into just 128 pages. Van Pelt recapitulates her experience of an aspect of the situation and then moves on to another subtopic. Some sections were definitely richer, more fleshed out and punchier than others, and these are the places where In Silence I Speak is at its best. The sense of disorientation and being unplugged and lost is well-provided in "Psychiatric Interlude"; and the new hopes arising from mutual support and connection are very evocative in "A Time of Growth and Change". She details the sense of betrayal and her frustration with the obliviousness of her professional colleagues in "Flying Beyond Institutional Walls" and "Beyond the World of Madness".
The thinnest and most perfunctory sections of the book are the early ones describing her initial descent into dysfunctional patterns. Whether out of a reluctance to relinquish her remaining privacy or, as she hints, because it's still a painful place to go back to and relive long enough to capture on paper, we aren't given a really visceral sense of what was happening to her and how it felt.
But in the emergence into the peer support and psychiatric rights community, her tale is compelling, in large part because it is so effectively prefaced by her description of what it was like to try to provide those kinds of services and be a participant and colleague within the medical-model version that the peer services are an alternative to.
Mary Elizabeth Van Pelt. In Silence I Speak: My Journey Through Madness. Paperback and Kindle editions. Albuquerque NM: Mercury Heartlink 2010
-----
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My third book is deep in second draft, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts