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This book by Janet and Paul Gotkin is an extraordinary indictment of psychiatry, psychiatrists, and other mental-health workers. It deserves a non-judgmental and sober reading. It is also extraordinary in its clear, fluid, forthright style, in its readability, in its clutching repetitiveness, in its abysmal poignancy. It is the voice of life in a young woman, a voice she was the first to ignore, a voice she could therefore not make heard, a voice her therapists did not hear nor even suspect existed.
Too Much Anger, Too Many Tears is an account of Janet Gotkin's ten years of experiences with psychoanalysts, psychiatric institutions, electroshock treatments, and chemotherapy. It is, too, the account of her love for her husband, Paul, and of his for her; of the impact of her parents upon her and of their uncomprehending almost martyred suffering; of the impotence of her therapists.
After an exemplary adolescence without any outward rebellion or turmoil, Janet Gotkin might be said by some to have started to experience the pangs of an especially stormy but delayed adolescence in her late teens. Anguished fears and doubts mingled with bitter, benign hallucination became dependable companions.
Her hospitalizations are viewed as fearsome, with unfeeling personnel, rigid and foolish regulations, gross disinterest. References to empathizing copatients and selected hospital personnel light up the page. But these individuals are too few, too powerless, too ineffective—although they seem to be the ones who helped Janet Gotkin keep faith with her “real self.” (How apt