The author describes her two-year stay at a psychiatric hospital renowned for its famous clientele and for its progressive methods of treatment.

"Dr. Timothy Ryan, head of the military psychiatric unit at Grantham Barracks, is meeting a new patient, a woman known as Prisoner Alpha. As she is being transferred, they are attacked by assassins, barely escaping with their lives. One shooter vanishes, leaving behind a dead companion unlike anyone Ryan has ever seen. But even more baffling is the puzzle of Alpha herself. She speaks in a strange tongue, and doodles in bars, dots, and little pictures...

"In a series of online posts, Parker H., a young psychiatrist, chronicles the harrowing account of his time working at a dreary mental hospital in New England. Through this internet message board, Parker hopes to communicate with the world his effort to cure one bewildering patient. We learn, as Parker did on his first day at the hospital, of the facility's most difficult, profoundly dangerous case-a 40-year-old man who was originally admitted to...

Put on trial by her slaveholder husband and convicted of madness by a Virginia judge, Iris Dunleavy is sent to Sanibel Asylum to be restored to a good wife. But Iris knows her husband is the true criminal; she is no lunatic, only guilty of violating Southern notions of property. A pompous superintendent heads this asylum populated by wonderful characters, including his self-diagnosing twelve-year-old son, a woman who swallows anything in sight, and...

"Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a seminal novel of the 1960s. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants--a counterculture classic that inspired the 1975 film adaptation, widely considered one of the greatest movies ever made"--

"A young woman with amnesia falls under the influence of a powerful doctor in Paris's notorious women's asylum, where she must fight to reclaim dangerous memories-and even more perilously, her sanity-in this gripping historical novel inspired by true events, from the bestselling author of Wunderland. "I didn't see her the day she came to the asylum. Looking back, this sometimes strikes me as unlikely. Impossible, even, given how utterly her arrival...

"Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?" wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history's ghosts, they have been revived at last by Maud Casey in City of Incurable Women as complex, flesh-and-blood people, dispossessed and marginalized due to their gender and class but with their own stories to tell. These linked, evocative prose portraits, accompanied by period photographs and medical documents both authentic and re-imagined, poignantly...

"1951. Esther Durrant, a young mother, is committed to an isolated mental asylum by her husband. Run by a pioneering psychiatrist, the hospital is at first Esther's prison but soon surprisingly becomes her refuge. 2018. Free-spirited marine scientist Rachel Parker embarks on a research posting in the Isles of Scilly, off the Cornish coast. When a violent storm forces her to take shelter on a far-flung island, she discovers a collection of hidden...

Looks at the making of the Oxford English dictionary.