#234
Title:
The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital AtticAuthors: Darby Penney, Peter Stastny, Lisa Rinzler (photographer)
Publishers: Bellevue Literary Press
Year: 2008
205 pages
Terribly
disappointing because it could have been wonderful, but instead suffers
from repetitive, barely-restrained vitriol. The book's ostensible focus
is on reconstructing, from suitcases left in the attic, the lives of
people who were patients at a residential psychiatric hospital. This is
an interesting proposition, but it is not pursued hermeneutically or
adequately. The problem is not that the authors have a point to make and
use the case studies to support it. Rather, they are not sufficiently
up-front about their agenda and present a veneer of scientific inquiry
to convey their neutrality. However, they are not neutral, and their
thesis is ill-served by not being explicitly described.
An
otherwise-interesting topic is marred by heavy negative
over-generalization, failure to stick to the topic it proposes to
present, and failure to separate the issue of type and quality of care
from the question of what to do when a person is unable to manage in
society. Making the book worse is poor editing, both in terms of
sometimes-confusing organization and flow, and unclear and repetitive
statements. Some important information and explanation are also missing
(for example, whose hands are holding the people's possessions in the
photos, and is it journalistically suspect to have used hands that
appear to match the person's demographics?). Another area that seems
deceptive and detracts significantly is the authors' contradictory
attitude about the patients' privacy. On the publishing information
page, they report that they would have used patients' names but for
privacy laws. I can understand this regret; my dissertation study
participants wanted me to use their names and I was not permitted to do
so. However, the authors' desire to use names stems from their own
wishes, not their subjects', as their subjects are dead. Presumably if
the patients' relatives had given permission, the authors could have
used the patients' names (since the survivors hold the decedents'
privilege). It is possible that the patients would not have wanted their
names used. In this light, the authors' use of people's first names,
full-face photos, and potentially identifying information seems both coy
and unethical, as well as unnecessary and provocative. Who is it who
was stripped of their autonomy and used for other people's ends by the
bad legal/medical/psychiatric abusers? And whose privacy is abrogated by
the authors, for their own purposes? Hmm.
I support the authors'
contentions that psychiatry has been used as an instrument of social
control and management, that patients were and are pathologized and
disbelieved, and that they often receive inadequate care, especially in
public institutions. This is widely documented and more effectively
demonstrated elsewhere, though it bears repeating. The authors could
have used this book more effectively for this purpose had they
constrained their editorializing and not engaged in multiple instances
of extreme and overgeneralized assertions. For example, they don't give
any examples of people who they think need any kind of psychiatric
intervention, yet also condemn the state and psychiatric/medical
profession for not providing other services. Perhaps most egregiously
problematic, they condemn the objectification of the patients and the
loss of their complexity and humanity, yet by only portraying the parts
of patients' histories that support the authors' perspective, they also
treat the patients as objects that serve the authors' ends.
