Disturbing look at modern psychiatric care. The book does a good job highlighting the shocking range between the worst and the best hospitals, and makes you wonder how far we've really advanced since Bedlam if the first is still so prevalent; and how anyone in those places ever actually gets better given the glimpses of daily life we get.

However as a novel, it doesn't really hold together. There's no progress here; the protagonist is confused and upset from the first page to the last, with no resolution in sight, and no real hope that there will be one. ( )