Volume 18, Number 9 · May 18, 1972
The Case of Michael Wechsler
By Robert Coles
In a Darkness
by James A. Wechsler
Norton, 160 pp., $5.95
Recovered psychiatric patients don't usually write about their experiences in and out of the hospital, but enough of them have done so to make a tradition of sorts. One thinks of A Mind That Found Itself, written by Clifford Beers in 1907; or Fight Against Fears, Lucy Freeman's dramatic account of her troubles—a bestseller in the middle 1940s, when psychiatry was catching hold among the middle and upper American bourgeoisie; or more recently, Barbara Field Benziger's The Prison of My Mind, from which the reader learns how the rich can be hoodwinked and devastated by the seamier side of medicine and its various specialties—all those 'rest homes' and 'sanitoria' with their pretty names, set up to fleece patrons, whom they insult and humiliate, then quickly discharge when cash runs out or suspicions (no doubt called 'paranoia') get dangerously active.
Review, 4927 words
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