The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in Our Times

Abstract

Reviews the book,The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in Our Times by Barbara Taylor (2015). With increased openness people are now coming to terms with the extent and nature of suffering in mental illness, but despite every effort at understanding, it takes an intelligent patient with exceptional writing skills to really articulate it properly. Barbara Taylor, a renowned Canadian historian, illustrates this perfectly in this excellent, and at times rawly excoriating, account of her own passage through the mental health systems in London in the latter years of the 20th century, covering 21 years of psychoanalysis with the same therapist; admission to Friern Hospital, a north London mental hospital renowned for having the longest corridor in Europe (one-third of a mile); the subsequent closure of this hospital; and a succession of supportive environments. Barbara does not dwell on the formal nature of her own mental illness, but it is primarily concerned with emotional dysregulation and substance misuse (of several kinds). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)