Introduction to Voluntary Madness

For our lit circle project, we are going to be reading Voluntary Madness by Norah Vincent. It is a New York Times bestselling book.

Overall, we think that this topic is extremely interesting. Most people have no clue what goes on in mental facilities/institutions, and this book will be a great way to gain more insight on the topic. We feel undereducated about it, so the topic sparks our interest and makes us actually want to know more.

Our demographics don't really affect how we will read the book. We haven't been brought up to be "shun" the mentally ill, but since we haven't been exposed to the patients, we might be a little scared of the patients. We all went into this book with an open mind, since we haven't had any experiences that would make us think differently.

The only person who has really been "exposed" to the topic of mental hospitals is Krissy. She wrote a paper on Schizoprenia and did research on the subject for about a year. Otherwise, Neil and Alecia have no previous knowledge of the ethnography and are pretty much clueless.

In general, a bias towards mental patients are that they are crazy, depressed, loud, and unclean. These may sound mean, but people have biased opinions because they are undereducated about a subject, so they make up their own views and put wrong thoughts into there heads. None of us have had relatives in a mental hospital, so we are not directly related and will not be affected emotionally by this book.