Ron Powers and his wife, Honoree Fleming, were intellectuals with two growing sons when their idyllic life in a Vermont college town began to fray. Both of them taught at Middlebury, she as a scientist and he as a writing teacher. Their sons, auburn-haired Dean and blond Kevin, three years younger, were bright, sensitive and well-liked.
But not very far into the wide-reaching examination of the treatment of mental illness, we learn that Kevin has died after being diagnosed with schizophrenia, and that Dean is being treated for the same disease. The very moving story of these young men’s problems runs in tandem with Powers discussion of society’s shameful treatment of mentally ill people throughout history. He recounts how when it appeared that some progress was being made in the United States after World War II, two individuals—Thomas Szasz, a physician, and L. Ron Hubbard, a science fiction writer and founder of Scientology— played a powerful role in running reform off the tracks, as it is still today. Our mentally ill population was pushed out of the asylum into the streets and prisons.
Out of respect for family privacy, Ron Powers first undertook a study not only of psychiatry as a social policy but of various treatments, many of them deadly, and how they came into use. An editor convinced him to relate the family’s experience with mental illness, and these passages give the book a kind of vibrancy and tenderness that pulled this reader through the forest of doctors and “experts” (almost all male) and their conceptions of and treatment for illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, Altzheimer’s, and schizo-affective disorder.
Scans have demonstrated that severe mental illness is a disease that distorts the brain, something that Freud and his followers had no way of knowing without access to magnetic scanning. Powers is particularly instructive about the vulnerability of the teen brain, which is pruning tissue and reorganizing as the youth becomes and adult. A compelling theory is that stress and drugs, such as marijuana, can have a detrimental effect on a developing mind genetically predisposed to mental illness.
This is not an easy read, but it’s a vital one that goes beyond a single family that was willing to share its suffering and point the way toward healing.
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Powers’ moving memoir/history brings a depth to his personal experience living with two sons diagnosed with schizophrenia in their early twenties.He traces the rise and fall of the asylum, the atrocious treatment of the mentally ill in modern times, and the intractable remnants of cruelty shown to those unfortunate to suffer from mental illness in the U.S. and Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.Powers doesn’t package the topic neatly and tie it in a bow, and his pain and longing for a healthy life for his sons shines through, especially in e-mail correspondences he shares. The circumstances of a fatal accident one son was involved in, and subsequent ostracization from his small rural community, combined with the suffering from mental illness experienced by both of his sons sticks with me—as a parent and fellow human being—like a deep wound.The book is ultimately a testament to one family’s resiliency, and a call for a more civilized, concerted societal effort to understand and properly treat a range of psychiatric disorders.
Top reviews from other countries
penelope costin
Extremely well written and oh so sadly true as the ...
Reviewed in Canada on May 24, 2017
Muffin
A Book for Those Who Care About Crazy People.
Reviewed in Canada on April 23, 2017