Voluntary Madness
My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin
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Narrated by:
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Tavia Gilbert
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By:
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Norah Vincent
About this listen
Vincent's journey takes her from a big-city hospital to a facility in the Midwest and finally to an upscale retreat down south, as she analyzes the impact of institutionalization on the unwell, the tyranny of drugs as treatment, and the dysfunctional dynamics between caregivers and patients.
©2008 Norah Vincent (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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When Amy B. Scher was struck with undiagnosed late-stage, chronic Lyme disease, the best physicians in America labeled her condition incurable and potentially terminal. Deteriorating rapidly, she went on a search to save her own life - from the top experts in Los Angeles and the world-renowned Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis to a state-of-the-art hospital in Chicago. After exhausting all of her options in the US, she discovered a possible cure - but it was highly experimental, available only in India, and had as much of a probability of killing her as it did of curing her.
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A great comfort
- By Sue on 07-07-18
By: Amy B. Scher
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Because I Come from a Crazy Family
- The Making of a Psychiatrist
- By: Edward M. Hallowell
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 13 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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When Edward M. Hallowell was 11, a voice out of nowhere told him he should become a psychiatrist. A mental health professional of the time would have called this psychosis. But young Edward (Ned) took it in stride, despite not quite knowing what "psychiatrist" meant. With a psychotic father, an alcoholic mother, an abusive stepfather, and two so-called learning disabilities of his own, Ned was accustomed to unpredictable behaviour from those around him and to a mind he felt he couldn't always control.
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Love and connection permeates through this book!
- By Steve Steinmetz on 06-29-18
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The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head
- A Psychiatrist's Stories of His Most Bizarre Cases
- By: Gary Small M.D., Gigi Vorgan
- Narrated by: Marc Cashman
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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True stories are more bizarre than any fiction, and Dr. Gary Small knows this best. After 30 distinguished years of psychiatry and groundbreaking research on the human brain, Dr. Small has seen it all - now he is ready to open his office doors for the first time and tell all about the most mysterious, intriguing, and bizarre patients of his career. The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head is a spellbinding record of the doctor's most bewildering cases.
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90% Useless Information
- By Think B4 Eating on 10-01-10
By: Gary Small M.D., and others
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Committed
- Dispatches from a Psychiatrist in Training
- By: Adam Stern MD
- Narrated by: Adam Stern MD
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Adam Stern was a student at a state medical school before being selected to train as a psychiatry resident at one of the most prestigious programs in the country. His new and initially intimidating classmates were high achievers from the Ivy League and other elite universities. Faculty raved about the group as though the residency program had won the lottery, nicknaming them “The Golden Class”, but would Stern ever prove that he belonged? In his memoir, Stern pulls back the curtain on the intense and emotionally challenging lessons he and his fellow doctors learned.
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Thank you for reminding me,
- By Ms D on 12-29-21
By: Adam Stern MD
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Expecting Adam
- A True Story of Birth, Rebirth, and Everyday Magic
- By: Martha Beck
- Narrated by: Joyce Bean
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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From the moment Martha and her husband, John, conceived their second child, all hell broke loose. They were a couple obsessed with success. After years of matching IQs and test scores with less driven peers, they had two Harvard degrees apiece and were gunning for more. But the dream had begun to disintegrate. Then, when their unborn son, Adam, was diagnosed with Down syndrome, doctors, advisers, and friends in the Harvard community warned them not to keep the baby.
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True Life Fairy Tale
- By Desarae on 11-27-13
By: Martha Beck
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The Eden Express
- A Memoir of Insanity
- By: Mark Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Pete Cross
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Mark Vonnegut set out in search of Eden with his VW bug, his girlfriend, his dog, and his ideals, but genetic predisposition and a whole lot of shit going down made him crazy in a culture that told him mental illness is a myth and schizophrenia is a sane response to an insane society. Describing his experiences during the late '60s and early '70s, Eden Express reveals how Mark went from being a recent college grad who was in love and living communally on a farm to having nervous breakdowns.
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Touches the challenges of human condition
- By Glenn Ainsworth on 06-23-23
By: Mark Vonnegut
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Murphy's Boy
- By: Torey Hayden
- Narrated by: Loretta Rawlins
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
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His name was Kevin but his keepers called him Zoo Boy. He didn't talk. He hid under tables and surrounded himself with a cage of chairs. He hadn't been out of the building in the four years since he'd come in. He was afraid of water and wouldn't take a shower. He was afraid to be naked, to change his clothes. He was nearly 16. Desperate to see change in the boy, the staff of Kevin's adolescent treatment center hired Hayden. As Hayden read to him and encouraged him to read, crawling down into his cage of chairs with him, Kevin talked.
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want to meet Kevin
- By Cherish on 10-14-15
By: Torey Hayden
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Your Voice in My Head
- A Memoir
- By: Emma Forrest
- Narrated by: Emma Forrest
- Length: 5 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Emma Forrest, a British journalist, was just 22 and living the fast life in New York City when she realized that her quirks had gone beyond eccentricity. In a cycle of loneliness, damaging relationships, and destructive behavior, she found herself in the chair of a slim, balding, and effortlessly optimistic psychiatrist--a man whose wisdom and humanity would wrench her from the dangerous tide after she tried to end her life.
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Great, quick read
- By Amazon Customer on 02-12-21
By: Emma Forrest
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Everything You Ever Wanted
- A Memoir
- By: Jillian Lauren
- Narrated by: Jillian Lauren
- Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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In her younger years, Jillian Lauren was a college dropout, a drug addict, and an international concubine in the Prince of Brunei's harem, an experience she immortalized in her best-selling memoir, Some Girls. In her 30s, Jillian's most radical act is learning the steadying power of love when she and her rock star husband adopt an Ethiopian child with special needs.
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Great for adoptive families
- By berry bomb on 07-06-22
By: Jillian Lauren
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The Soloist
- A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music
- By: Steve Lopez
- Narrated by: William Hughes
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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When journalist Steve Lopez sees Nathaniel Ayers playing his heart out on a two-string violin on Los Angeles' skid row, he finds it impossible to walk away. More than 30 years ago, Ayers was a promising classical bass student at Juilliard - ambitious, charming, and also one of the few African-Americans there - until he gradually lost his ability to function, overcome by schizophrenia.
Over time, the two men form a bond and Lopez imagines that he might be able to change Ayers' life. The Soloist is a beautifully told story of devotion in the face of seemingly unbeatable challenges.
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Fantastic Audiobook
- By reggie p on 06-26-08
By: Steve Lopez
What listeners say about Voluntary Madness
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous User
- 08-05-21
Halfway there?
I had to read this for a class I'm teaching, I would have stopped reading if it were not required. I struggled to complete the first 3/4 of the book because of the narrator's tone towards fellow human beings. It was honestly hard to get through some sections with such a hateful, derisive tone towards other patients in the institutions and the staff. I saw the narrator as exceptionally arrogant, and though the end of the book somewhat explained that attitude I still would not read anything else by this author. This book does show some good points about how our healthcare system works but it lacks hard facts to do back up the personal narrative really effectively. I wish it would have either been a heavily researched account on healthcare systems and evidence of how and why they operate how they do, or a full memoir on personal struggles with mental health, but it was neither. The end chapter essentially concludes that people don't get better unless they want to get better, which just re-emphasizes the idea that the narrator simply dislikes fellow human beings and doesn't have any insights on how mental health systems can be improved.
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- LA-Radio Ken
- 12-27-23
Eye opening
Her truth shines through her words. I finally realize that maybe our system to help people is completely broken. I loved that she was able to share her journey.
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- Nathan Bohman
- 07-15-24
No one can help you but yourself
While I've never been to a bin myself, this story does mirror several I've heard from those who have. Norah's a captivating writer and the narrator does a superb job of conveying the emotions behind the words. I would highly recommend a listen along with Norah's Self Made Man.
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- Jaden
- 11-07-23
Critical and relatable!
I really enjoyed this book! Norah is insightful and observant. She sees people for who they are. I've had my own struggles with "mental illness" and I relate so much to everything she says about the system of care and current psychiatric approaches. Her experience is shared by so many and we need more people like her willing to say it. It was difficult reading it knowing she later killed herself, always hoping maybe the next chapter she finds the help she needs but knowing ultimately that she doesn't.
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- Carin
- 11-17-11
Not quite Cuckoo but makes me glad I'm sane!
I got this audiobook after reading Ms. Vincent's prior book, Self-Made Man. After months impersonating a man to infiltrate male-centric societies, Norah was so shaken by the experience, she checked herself into a mental hospital. While there, as an immersive journalist, her thoughts naturally went to: "This would make a good book!" And off she went...
She did not use that first experience in the book except to explain why she wrote it. So this book covers her experiences in 3 hospitals: an East Coast public hospital, a Midwest private hospital, and a West Coast private new-age spa-like hospital. As the prices went up, so did the services and the level of therapy. There was virtually none at the public hospital - Norah got 15 minutes of therapy per day there, which I found almost laughable. This place was also the one most focused on medicating patients. The Midwest hospital had a great psychiatrist who gave Norah daily off-campus passes and who didn't prescribe meds for her that she did not want. The third hospital had a lot of different kinds of therapy but most importantly, had a kindly, caring social worker who gave Norah insights she wasn't expecting.
I think that was the most interesting part of the book for me, and the most unexpected for Norah herself. She went into the project not wanting to lie, therefore she used her own name and her own medical records with their history of depression. However, she thought she was going to these hospitals purely for book research, and she wasn't expecting to get anything out of it. In the end, she got a lot (although not from the public hospital.) I found it interesting how even the most intelligent and educated among us can still be in serious denial about how much help we can use.
Initially I wasn't crazy about the narrator. I'm not sure why but her voice didn't match up to what I was expecting or it wasn't fitting with the emotions or something, but by the time I was halfway in, that wasn't a problem at all anymore. She'd grown on me. And one little negative about audiobooks in general: sometimes in paper books I will skim a little bit, such as over a section about how disgusting it was to eat with some of the highly medicated insane patients in the public hospital, but in an audiobook you can't, so I was thoroughly grossed out when if I'd been reading the print version I would have only been mildly grossed out as I would have glossed that section. I've listened to other books where the problem of not being able to skim came up but not in this way. It's interesting how listening to audiobooks really can be a very different experience from reading print.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Angela Rhodes
- 10-08-12
Self indulgent.
"Voluntary" Madness is a fitting name for this book. It seems like Norah Vincent is milking a case of mild depression to get into mental hospitals in order to write a book. One gets the feeling that she wants to be sicker than she actually is. The overall tone is whiny and self-indulgent.
There are redeeming parts of the book. I enjoyed listening to the parts that talked about the various treatments available to Vincent for her mental illness. Living with a mental illness myself, I'm always in the market for quality treatment that will make me feel better and not worse.
If you are interested in mental illness and its treatment, you will get something out of this book. If you are looking for a good experiential read about one woman's journey through madness, you will be disappointed by this sometimes trite, often self-indulgent book.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Gemma L.
- 06-27-21
Oh, god, no.
Pseudoscientific and privileged outlook on the mental health field. The lion’s share of the information in this is unproven, unfounded, bias, or has been discredited.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Shashabeel
- 06-30-23
Endless meaningless ramble
This was an incoherent, endless useless ramble was so much negativity. He will learn nothing and it’s not even entertaining.
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- Susan A. Meyer
- 05-10-12
Welcome to a 10-hour Rant
What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?
This is not a revealing story or a well-thought-out treatise on mental health care. It is a 10-hour rant of uneducated suppositions about what the author thinks about psychiatry and mental health care. As someone who has been committed to a psychiatric hospital for almost a year and who later went on to become board certified in psychiatric nursing, I am horrified that anyone would take this author's ramblings seriously.
What do you think your next listen will be?
Something about crime
What didn’t you like about Tavia Gilbert’s performance?
The reader did not do the story any favors. She read the book so fast and with such a complaining tone, that it added to the "rantyness" of the prose.
What character would you cut from Voluntary Madness?
Norah Vincent
Any additional comments?
Don't buy this audiobook.
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4 people found this helpful
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- JD
- 12-11-17
Boring
This book was incredibly boring and bland. There was a lot of repetition, honest I couldn’t get through the entire thing. I was definitely expecting something with much more substance.
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