Description
In Committed to the Sane Asylum: Narratives on Mental Wellness and Healing, artist Susan Schellenberg, a former psychiatric patient, and psychologist Rosemary Barnes relate their own stories, conversations, and reflections concerning the contributions and limitations of conventional mental health care and their collaborative search for alternatives such as art therapy. Patient and doctor each describe personal decisions about the mental health system and the creative life possibilities that emerged when mind, body, and spirit were committed to well-being and healing.
Interwoven patient/doctor narratives explain conventional care, highlight critical steps in healing, and explore varied perspectives through conversations with experts in psychiatry, feminist approaches, art, storytelling, and business. The book also includes reproductions of Susan’s mental health records and dream paintings.
This book will be important for consumers of mental health care wishing to understand the conventional system and develop the best quality of life. Rich personal detail, critical perspective, clinical records, and art reproductions make the book engaging for a general audience and stimulating as a teaching resource in nursing, social work, psychology, psychiatry, and art therapy.
Awards
- Short-listed, Finalist for the ForeWord Magazine 2009 Book of the Year Award in the Psychology Category 2009
Reviews
What sets this book apart is the insight it provides into patience and clinician experiences in the parallel and often overlapping narratives. Schellenberg and Barnes have never had a patient-clinican relationship, but their identities as each inform their friendship, and their experiences individually and together fuel each other's transformation. This is a story of people exploring their past in a quest to understand who they are and where they are headed.... War is a metaphor for madness in this book—the problematic approach to recovery depicted as an epic battle against unwanted parts of oneself. Schellenberg and Barnes' stories advocate exploring and embracing ourselves wholly. Schellenberg shares pages from her files as a psychiatric patient, which, she says, allows the medical professionals she interracted with to tell their side of the story. Reading the charts is surreal. It is gut-wrenching to see the impersonal nature of the notes, and to realize the profound impact that these superficial, subjective observations had on Schellenberg's life.... The book is compellingly frank and accessible. The stories are intensely personal. Schellenberg and Barnes share with such honesty that it is easy to become immersed. These are stories about truth—the courage to look for it and the healing that comes from embracing it.
- Jane Shulman, Canadian Women's Health Network, April 2014, 2014 June