Working the Trap: On Suzanne Scanlon’s “Committed”

Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen by Suzanne Scanlon AT 20, WRITER Suzanne Scanlon checked herself into the New York State Psychiatric Institute. The ward, her home for the next three years, was a living relic of the midcentury golden age of long-term inpatient psychiatric care. Dorms and common spaces radiated outward from a panopticon-like nurses’ station, presided over by a framed photograph of Sigmund Freud. An outpatient psychoanalyst had diagnosed her with hysteria, that tired, sexist catch-all for female emotional pain; on the ward, Scanlon rehashed her childhood wounds ad nauseam with a rotating group of doctors looking for the magic trauma plot point to explain her suicide attempt months before. The patients—mostly women—spent their sedentary days smoking and watching television, their hands shaking from tardive dyskinesia, the uncontrollable muscle tremors induced by antipsychotics and tricyclic antidepressants. These scenes of daily life in the psych ward, which Scanlon depicts in her new memoir Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen , bring to mind the standard of care familiar from classic asylum narratives like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), The Bell Jar (1963), and Howl (1955), which Allen Ginsberg wrote following his own 1949–50 stint in the same hospital. But Scanlon arrived at the Institute in 1992, at the dawn of the Clinton era, years into the sea change in the conceptualization of mental illness that began with the systematic defunding and closure of long-term psychiatric facilities in the 1960s and accelerated in the late 1980s with the arrival of Prozac, the first SSRI antidepressant. This shifting landscape, and Scanlon’s struggle to carve out an identity for herself as a young woman within it, animates Committed , a personal history of mental illness as well as a study of the long lineage of writing about madness and medicine. The Institute’s doctors, she writes, “needed me to get better and instead I got better at being sick”—a function of the treatment modalities, already outmoded by the early ’90s, that taught patients to perform illness in exchange for care. Scanlon’s literary heroes, from Virginia Woolf to Audre Lorde, Shulamith Firestone, and […]

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