Is There No Place on Earth for Me?

Susan Sheehan spent years following a young Queens woman she named Sylvia Frumkin through the mental health system, and the book she built from that reporting reads less like a case study than a document of one particular person's schizophrenia from inside her own days rather than from a clinician's file. Sylvia cycles repeatedly through psychiatric hospitals, halfway houses and brief stretches at home, and Sheehan tracks every one of those cycles in close, patient detail, the medications that work for a while and then stop working, the diagnoses that shift between doctors, and the exhausting, often thankless effort of the family and staff trying to help her.

Sheehan reports rather than interprets. She rarely steps in to explain what a reader should feel about Sylvia's condition or about the institutions meant to treat it, choosing instead to let scene after accumulated scene make the case that the American mental health system of the period offers a person like Sylvia no real place to land, only a rotation of temporary ones. The book grew out of reporting Sheehan first published in The New Yorker, and that magazine's own patient, fact dense house style shapes the finished book as much as its subject does.

Reading it means sitting with a great deal of repetition, hospitalization after hospitalization, relapse after relapse, without the narrative arc a novel would supply, and that repetition is the book's actual argument rather than a flaw in it. It suits a reader who wants to understand serious mental illness as a lived, daily condition rather than as a diagnosis summarized in a paragraph, and who is prepared for a book that offers no resolution because Sylvia's own life did not offer one either.