Lewis, Mindy 1952-

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LEWIS, Mindy 1952-

PERSONAL: Born 1952. Education: Attended the New School for Social Research, New York, NY, the Writer's Voice, New York, and the Art Student's League, New York.

ADDRESSES: Home—New York, NY. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Simon & Schuster, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. E-mail—info@ mindylewislifeinside.com.

CAREER: Painter, graphic artist, and writer.

MEMBER: Authors Guild, International Women's Writing Guild.

WRITINGS:

Life Inside: A Memoir, Atria Books (New York, NY), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS: An artist and writer, Mindy Lewis is above all a survivor. At the age of fifteen, she was committed to the New York State Psychiatric Institute (PI) by her mother, but under court remand so that she couldn't change her mind. At the time Lewis had already shown enough painting talent to be accepted to New York's High School of Music and Art, but she had also displayed behavioral problems, discovered drugs, and made a half-hearted attempt at suicide. She was diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia, a diagnosis she vehemently denies was ever true, and was confined until the age of eighteen, when she could no longer be held against her will. In Life Inside: A Memoir she describes how it felt to come of age in a mental institution. "This book is about what happens when adolescent angst is pushed to a limit at a time when margins and psychological definitions were much narrower," Lewis told an interviewer for Chronogram magazine.

It was an odd world of close monitoring, combined with easy access to sex and drugs, including a Thorazine regimen, and close friendships with a sometimes tragic edge. Many of her friends attempted suicide, and some succeeded. And while her time there was finite, Lewis shows clearly how those three years dramatically affected her adulthood, which was often as turbulent as her adolescence. "Lewis's intimate, almost conversational prose shows the poignant specifics and enormous difficulty of her search for 'wholeness—the ultimate myth,'" wrote Booklist reviewer Gillian Engberg. At the same time "Lewis's story calls into question the very definition of mental illness and the system that makes such determinations," noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Drawing on her own patient records and interviews with her former psychiatrists, each of whom apologized for treatments they now consider archaic, Lewis delivers something of an indictment of the psychiatric profession, which in her view is too often driven by current fads and mindsets, sometimes with terrible results. In trying to contact old friends from the institution, she discovered that many had committed suicide and others suffered long-lasting side effects from their medications. It is a powerful and moving story, "complex, chilling, luminous," in the words of a Kirkus Reviews contributor.