Songs of the Captive Unchained A Collection of Essays From the Heart of the Mental Patient Liberation Movement

In 1978, not long after her College graduation, Elizabeth A. Richter experienced a temporary breakdown which led to a misdiagnosis and hospitalization of a little over two years at one of the foremost psychiatric hospitals in the country--McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA. The roots of Elizabeth's emotional distress lay in the early loss in high school of her little brother, Henry, who was born with multiple malignant brain tumors. Further, Elizabeth was marginalized, scapegoated and abused by a family deeply affected by her mother's drug and alcohol abuse and her father's history in the holocaust.While at McLean, Elizabeth endured the darker aspect of life in a psychiatric facility in the late 70s--a lengthy hospitalization far beyond what was necessary, treatment that disregarded her reasons for being there, and the inevitable abuses that emerged from the major power imbalances between staff and patients.