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In this rich and important work, psychologist Gail Hornstein, the biographer of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, has taken the rare step of writing a history, right up to the present, of the patient's experience of mental health treatment—from the patient's perspective. She focuses on the spoken words and the published literature of people diagnosed primarily with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and she recounts their stories, including their desperate, traumatizing journeys through the mental health system, in vivid and often painful color. As such, Agnes's Jacket—a title based on a late nineteenth century mental patient's struggle to have her voice be heard by stitching her lonely words all over her hospital jacket—reads like much of the mental patient literature: as protest literature.
In this vein, Hornstein makes the fascinating point that in no other branch of medicine but psychiatry do the voices of so many of the doctors and so many of the patients differ so dramatically in terms of their perspective on the treatment. This point alone should fan the flames of curiosity of anyone wishing to study the mental health field from an angle alternate to that presented by the mainstream field, the mainstream field which states that “mental illness” is caused primarily by chemical imbalances and genetics, that medications are vital, that the doctor knows best, that full recovery is impossible, and that the right of patients to have a say in their own treatment is invalid by the very nature of their “disease-induced” lack of insight and judgment.
As I read Agnes's Jacket I found myself wishing again and again that Hornstein had written it ten years earlier, when I myself was entering the mental health field. This book would have been a powerful and insightful ally for me. It could have spared me so much confusion—and