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Barbara Taylor's The Last Asylum is a haunting memoir about illness and the psychiatric health system. A well-regarded historian of nineteenth-century British history and literature, Taylor hasn't merely written an account of the British asylum systemshe's been a patient in it. Her battles with mental illness were sufficiently severe to lead to her institutionalization in the early 1980s, not long before the longstanding system began to change dramatically. Socially conscious and self-aware, Taylor writes incisively about her own position and privileges in various systems. She speaks clearly, bravely, and explicitly not only about her own experience but about the contemporary treatment of the mentally ill and the need for society to provide, in some sense, asylum for those who need it.
The first time I've ever considered there might actually be value in psychoanalysis. This one is riveting and disturbing in many of the ways Patient H.M. was, yet still completely different.
The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in Our Times | 
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