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The Last Asylum

A Memoir Of Madness In Our Times

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1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
In July 1988, Canadian-born historian Barbara Taylor was admitted to Friern Hospital, a once-notorious asylum for the insane. Her journey there began when, overwhelmed by anxiety as she completed her doctoral studies in London, England, she found relief by dosing herself with alcohol and tranquillizers. She then embarked on what would turn out to be a decades- long psychoanalysis.

The analysis dredged up acutely painful memories of an unhappy and confusing childhood back in Saskatoon. As Taylor struggled to cope with these, she would twice be re-admitted to Friern. She took refuge in day-care institutions and a psychiatric hostel, all the while continuing her therapy, which eventually put her on the road to recovery.

This searingly honest, beautifully written memoir is the narrative of the author’s madness years, set inside the wider story of our treatment of psychiatric illness: from the great age of asylums to the current era of community care, ‘Big Pharma’, and quick fixes. It is a meditation on her own experience as well as that of millions of others – both in Europe and in North America – who have suffered, are suffering, and will suffer from mental illness.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 12, 2015
      An academic's life as an asylum patient is illuminated in this intriguing memoir of illness and institutionalization. Taylor, a historian, grew up in Saskatoon as the daughter of political parents, her father a Welsh-born immigrant to Canada and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, her mother from a prominent Canadian Jewish family. Her childhood is troubled, her relationship with her philandering father angry and combative, with her mother loving but often critical. After a breakdown while living in London, Taylor enters Friern Hospital, one of three stints under institutional care in the 1980s. Her new home is a place of contradictions, full of "remorseless aloneness" yet also conducive to genuine friendship and solidarity amongst patients. Taylor intersperses her narrative with vignettes of sessions with her psychoanalyst identified only as "V." She writes with an academic's devotion to precision, an eschewal of self-pity evident even as she delves into her most emotionally harrowing experiences. While the analysis of the roots of her psychic trauma prior to institutionalization seems weaker and more diffuse than her descriptions of asylum life, the memoir's mixture of personal recollection and social history will provide fodder for those interested in a much misunderstood form of psychiatric treatment. Agent: David Godwin.

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  • English

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