The Last Asylum

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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. Best Read Kindle ePUB The Last Asylum Author Barbara Taylor – kino-fada.fr The Last Asylum A Memoir of Madness in Our Times This title, distilled to the three keywords asylum, memoir, madness is what caught my attention Together, of course, with a photo on the cover depicting the longest corridor in a mental institution the thing that Will Self called so beautifully the North Circular of the soul I promise myself this is the only nice thing I will ever say about Will Self.Barbara Taylor is an accomplished historian who went quite mad during her early thirti The Last Asylum A Memoir of Madness in Our Times This title, distilled to the three keywords asylum, memoir, madness is what caught my attention Together, of course, with a photo on the cover depicting the longest corridor in a mental institution the thing that Will Self called so beautifully the North Circular of the soul I promise myself this is ...Wow I picked up this book thinking it was going to be another Bell Jar, but oh no This is by far the most detailed look on Asylums and Mental Health treatment in Westernized countries I ve ever read 5 stars for just being so thorough Some people may find this Memoir to be too dense or too educational I just found it to be an engrossing history on a topic I m completely interested in.Barbara Taylor is a historian While in college she wrote papers on the history of feminism She wrote a book Wow I picked up this book thinking it was going to be another Bell Jar, but oh no This is by far the most detailed look on Asylums and Mental Health treatment in Westernized countries I ve ever read 5 stars for just being so thorough Some people may find this Memoir to be too dense or too educational I just found it to be an engrossing history on a topic I m completely interested in.Barbara Taylor is a historian While in college she wrote papers on the history of feminism She wrote a book However the anxiety of all that she was doing and teaching became too much In 1988, Barbara was admitted into Friern Hospital, one of Britain s last asylums.Barbara s illness was very much involved The pain of living with herself and her feelings become so overwhelming Barbara started self medicating with alcohol and prescription pills In the early stages she decided to work on...Britain s asylum system is a thing of the past You might expect this book to crow the author s triumph at their closure given she was a former patient of one , but that is not the case In fact, she seems to think their abolition is not entirely positive Along with her personal story, Taylor weaves in the history of mental asylums and psychoanalysis...I don t know how Taylor wrote this in the way she has To give us such rich detail of a long analysis in such short space But, , to weave intricately the historical responses to madness with her own personal journey It has touched me deeply in how it mirrors my own experiences of the system and my concerns for how we treat mental distress toda... From BBC radio 4 Book of the Week Barbara Taylor s story of her own breakdown and her recovery in England s last asylum.Author Barbara Taylor is in a unique position to write about mental health services as a historian, mental illness sufferer, and one of the last residents of a Victorian era asylum in London, she not only had an inside view of the old way of dealing with mental illness, but she also has had twenty years to digest her own experience and bear witness to what came next what came after institutionalised care was abolished.In The Last Asylum, Taylor shares her Canadian childhood as the daughter Author Barbara Taylor is in a unique position to write about mental health services as a historian, mental illness sufferer, and one of the last residents of a Victorian era asylum in London, she not only had an inside view of the old way of dealing with mental illness, but she also has had twenty years to digest her own experience and bear witness to what came next what came after institutionalised care was abolished.In The Last Asylum, Taylor shares her Canadian childhood as the daughter of an activist father who had fought Franco s forces in the Spanish Civil War and a mother who, while a sitting judge, suffe...Not always an easy read, but I am really glad I perservered with this one It is a fascinating and important examination of mental health services, told within a framework of personal experience There is also some very interesting history of the treatment of ment...Taylor spent some time in a mental institution and a lot of time being psychoanalysed Here she talks about her experiences as well as the treatment of the mentally ill in Britain Some parts of this read like literary fiction and I had to keep reminding myself it was not a novel so I guess th...As a counsellor, I struggled with some of the transcripts of her sessions, and would question the success of a treatment that took 21 years of full time analysis, but she makes some good points about the current system.For me this was a remarkably uneven book that begins as an endearingly forthright memoir that ultimately devolves into a sea of problematic, self contradictory and retrograde conclusions at the current state and future of psychiatry In the epilogue for the post asylum age, we have Taylor drawing a pitchfork against every initiative rolled out by the mental health services in the last decade concept of Recovery, Choice, Risk and Sectioning , all of them being dismissed as cost cutting, Orwelli For me this was a remarkably uneven book that begins as an endearingly forthright...

The Last Asylum
  • English
  • 05 May 2017
  • Kindle Edition
  • 320 pages
  • Barbara Taylor
  • The Last Asylum