In the first third of “Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen” by Suzanne Scanlon, there were many moments where I wondered about the author’s self-proclaimed madness. The mental illness she describes sounds like severe depression, despite the conflicting diagnoses she received in her long-term institutionalization, and does not harken to the literary and, frankly, more interesting madnesses that initially came to mind: the Mad Hatter, the shining described by Stephen King, and so on.

“Committed” offers a candid if esoteric view of a rich inner life — inside the New York State Psychiatric Institute, inside the confines of a mental illness shaped by grief and heroin chic and the nineties, inside the mind of a well-read young woman who survived to become an author and teacher. The book is a victory in that it accomplishes what Scanlon set out to do as an artist, and in that Scanlon as a person became “committed to life” in a post-patient existence after years of suicidal thoughts.

Two takeaways stick out to me. The first is her perspective on her madness and the structural approach to cure it. Scanlon spends a lot of time exploring both the epicenter of her depression — the loss of her mother to cancer at a young age (“the essential female tragedy” of a daughter’s loss of the mother, as she quotes Adrienne Rich) — and the ways that the care she received in the NYSPI may have helped and hindered her progression toward life outside the asylum.

It surprised me to learn about the ways that Scanlon felt that her illness was perpetuated. She experienced a kind of imposter syndrome at times, thinking that she was not as “sick” as other patients in the hospital, thinking that she was not as “normal” as other college students when she left the hospital, and knowing that she performed her illness to match some of the opinions of the doctors attempting to diagnose her.

She describes a desperation for care that is so great, that she was willing to perform — acting more sick, more helpless, more like whatever the doctors expected — in order to receive care that she did not know how to ask for otherwise.

“Tell me your feelings, talk to me about your problems, and I will decide if you are well enough to leave or if you must remain here. It was a sport,” she writes.

Maybe she did not have exactly the symptoms or the experience that she portrayed, but she was certainly experiencing something, some lack of a skillset or coping ability, that prevented her from functioning the way the average person would under stress, from asking for the support she needed to get through. On top of this, she was living a sedentary lifestyle, medicated over and over again, trusting doctors who even twenty years ago did not know as much as we know now about how to help someone who is suffering.

Not only did Scanlon experience this, but she provides evidence of this experience shared among authors and characters over the last hundred and fifty years. This brings me to the other takeaway from the memoir: an excellent and exhaustive list of suggested reading. Scanlon covers many texts about and by madwomen, from “The Yellow Wallpaper” to “Girl, Interrupted.”

She situates her story in the context of women’s mental health in the U.S., and women’s health generally. She compares her mother’s breast cancer to Audre Lorde’s experience with the same disease; she discusses Shulamith Firestone’s radical feminism; she brings perennial favorites Marguerite Duras and Toni Morrison and Sylvia Plath to the stage.

Readers looking for a light or funny read should keep looking elsewhere. Readers looking for a syllabus for beginning to understand women’s mental health will find one in “Committed.”

Kaitlyn Shirey is an engineer and writer from Westmoreland County.

First Published: May 12, 2024, 9:30 a.m.