The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in our Times - Hardcover

Taylor, Barbara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241145090 ISBN 13: 9780241145098

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2014

Synopsis

The Last Asylum is Barbara Taylor's journey through mental illness and the psychiatric health care system. The Last Asylum begins with Barbara Taylor's visit to the innocuously named Princess Park Manor in Friern Barnet, North London - a picture of luxury and repose. But this is the former site of one of England's most infamous lunatic asylums, the Middlesex County Pauper Lunatic Aslyum at Colney Hatch. At its peak this asylum housed nearly 3,000 patients - among them, in the 1980s, Barbara Taylor herself. The Last Asylum is Taylor's powerful account of her battle with mental illness, set inside the wider story of the end of the UK asylum system.

About this title

About the Author

Barbara Taylor is professor of humanities at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Eve and the New Jerusalem,Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, and, with Adam Phillips, On Kindness.

Review

“We believe our response to mental illness is more enlightened, kinder, and more effective than that of the Victorians who built the asylums. Can we be sure? Taylor’s somber investigation, calling on personal experience, challenges complacency, exposes shallow thinking, and points out the flaws and dangers of treatment on the cheap. It is a wise, considered, and timely book.” (Hilary Mantel)

“Eloquent, compassionate, and utterly absorbing. The Last Asylum is the best sort of memoir, transcending the purely personal to confront a larger social history.” (Sarah Waters, author of The Paying Guests)

“Taylor provides a gripping (often painful) account of her own experience of madness, a fascinating description of her psychoanalysis, a historical reflection on the role asylums played for inmates and the implications of their demise, and a meditation of the interrelationships between care and cure.” (Los Angeles Review of Books 2015-11-05)

“[A] brave and brilliant memoir. . . . an inside account of being out of one’s mind.” (Bookforum 2015-04-06)

Taylor’s history of asylums and mental health care and chronicle of her own treatment, which included several stays in England’s Friern mental hospital, reveals that mentally ill people have been subject to one medical fad after another, and too many of these trends best suited doctors, nurses, and therapists rather than their patients. . . . Taylor’s precise writing offers an informative overview of medical and social aspects of mental health care over the past few hundred years. . . . Those with mental health problems and their families will learn much here. Students of medicine and of the histories of psychology will also benefit from Taylor’s analysis of their fields.” (Library Journal 2015-04-06)

 "[An] unsparing portrait of a descent into madness." (Times Literary Supplement 2015-03-27)

"Exquisitely written and provocative." (Sunday Times (UK))

"Dazzling. . . . A tale that compels you to keep turning the pages. . . . A great achievement, full of life and hope." (Sunday Telegraph)

"A remarkable memoir-hybrid that opens up history from the inside. . . . A visceral and supremely intelligent account of [Taylor’s] breakdown and psychoanalytic treatment in the last years of the asylum system.” (Alison Light, author of Common People Guardian)

"This superb book combines the experience of the patient and the eye of the historian. Riveting, insightful, and relentlessly honest, it is both social history and memoir, and it makes an important contribution to contemporary debates on the treatment of mental distress." (Darian Leader, founding member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research (CFAR))

"Moving, brave and intelligent." (Times (UK))

"A gripping account . . . as exciting as any adventure story.” (Naomi Alderman Guardian)

"It is hard to write well enough about this book because it is so good." (Susie Orbach Independent)

“Not to be missed. The Last Asylum is an extraordinarily measured, fascinating, and honest account that stands out from all but a handful within the genre. . . . [It is] also a valuable piece of social history, documenting the demise of asylum mental health care during the years of deinstitutionalization; . . . It reveals the cruel underside of deinstitutionalization policies that have resulted in populations of the mentally ill homeless in city streets and locked up in county jails and prisons. . . . Taylor is to be applauded for an important and original contribution to our understanding of such disorder and its care.“ (Metapsychology 2015-10-07)

“Taylor takes readers on a fascinating if harrowing journey through her four years as an inpatient and outpatient in the British mental health-care system and her two decades in psychoanalysis. Her book offers an unflinching view of those whose illnesses beg a safe haven and whom the system often fails.” (Suzanne Allard Levingston Washington Post)

Edition details

• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241145090
• ISBN 13: 9780241145098
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 290