Journal 2

The author/ethnographer of Voluntary Madness is Norah Vincent. She is actually a journalist and her only other book that she has written is Self Made Man, where she disguised herself as a man and lived as one for a period of time. She used to be a weekly columnist for the New York Times, and she now writes quarterly articles for The Advocate. Vincent has also written for The New Republic, the New York Post, The Village Voice, and The Washington Post.

In Voluntary Madness, Vincent wanted to give people a better idea about what it is actually like to be in a mental institution. She wanted to clear up the stereotypes and set the talk straight about how mentally ill people really are. Since she was once in a mental hospital herself, she has a better insight about how it is to be mentally ill since she is "faking" it while doing her research.

Vincent's process was to enter a mental hospital for 10 days to up to 2 weeks. Our group thinks that she is somewhat flawed in this process because she only stayed for a short period of time. It's hard to really get close with people and make generalizations about them in only two weeks. Another flaw is how valid the information is that Vincent collected from the mentally ill patients. There may be fluctuations in what one person says versus another person.

After reading many reviews of Voluntary Madness, most readers do not like this book at all. The most common problem that people have with this book is that Vincent was biased towards certain medications even before she entered the mental hospitals because of her previous encounters with the medications. Jacinda, a reviewer on amazon.com, comments that there is no point to the book and doesn't know who it is written for. (amazon.com) She also notes that it is "practically an insult to who actually have a diagnosed mental illness, and full of opinions disguised as information" (amazon.com). The New York Times said that a more fair subtitle would be "My Five Weeks in the Loony Bin"(nytimes.com). Leigh-Ann from goodreads.com says that it would have been a better read if "it really had been an outsider's account of life in a mental institution, but instead, the book quickly becomes an account of Vincent's own battle with depression" (goodreads.com).