On the usefulness of first-person accounts.

Abstract

The apparently perpetual revisiting of issues related to the care and treatment of seriously mentally ill persons is no better illustrated than by examining patients' first-person accounts across the decades. We have recently done so in compiling an anthology, Women of the Asylum (9), and we see these issues reflected across time. More than simply cataloging patients' treatment and mistreatment experiences, first-person accounts can educate us to do better. If we listen closely to what the individuals who choose to publicize their experiences through this column have to tell us, perhaps our patients will be the beneficiaries of psychiatric care and treatment that derives from a more enlightened direction rather than from another cyclic repetition in the name of reform. Throughout the 19th century, first-person accounts were often an anathema to mainstream psychiatry. In 1883 John Callender (10), in the first presidential address at an American Psychiatric Association annual meeting, said: Amid all the di...