Making It Crazy: An Ethnography of Psychiatric Clients in an American Community

Review by 'New England Journal of Medicine' (from back cover) "[Estroff] explores the psychological, social and economic facts of life for a group of discharged mental-hospital patients living in Madison, Wisconsin. Her work both explicitly and inferentially raises questions about the rationale for deinstitutionalization...An anthropological field study, this work is the product of 2 years of intensive, often painful, sometimes elating, observations by the author. Her findings are carefully documented and presented.....'Making It Crazy' is an excellent book. It is a sensitive and revealing inquiry into the life of people whose welfare we have sought to promote by revolutionizing our system of psychiatric care. We need more data like Estroff's to help us assess the consequences of our efforts." ******* Contents Include: 1 - INTRODUCTION AND ORIENTATION * A Personal View of Clients and Staff * Development of the Topic and Perspective * Fieldwork--Tactical and Methodological Aspects 2 - ETHNOGRAPHIC MATERIAL * Clients and PACT--A Description * Medications * Subsistence Strategies--Employment, Unemployment, and Professional Disability * Normals, Crazies, Insiders, and Outsiders 3 - INTERPRETATION AND CONCLUSION * Reviews of Relevant Literature * The Social Construction of a Crazy Reality * The Sociocultural Context of Illness and Craziness * Reflections, Conclusions, and Questions for Further Research

It has been quite awhile since I've read this book, but I want to tell students, professors, and other people with mental illness like me (I suffer from recurrent depression) that this book gives an excellent description of what it is like to be among the mentally ill and what it is like to deal with chronic mental illness. The author immerses herself in the lives of a group of patients (clients) at a day treatment setting (which would probably now be horribly called "partial hospitalization") in a Northern city. She shows compassion for the clients, but, as I remember it, she really tells it like it is: there is no glorification of mental health treatment, there is direct honesty about the tough lives of the clients.I, myself, have been in a very similar setting to the one that Estroff describes, and I know the sense of cameraderie that is fostered, as well as, sadly, for most people, the lack of increased or better functioning that occurs.Overall, I think that Estroff's book, even though it is deeply descriptive (and meant to be such), nevertheless points out the desperate need for such programs in our society.