By Jenny Diski, London Review of Books, 6 Feb, 2014 and online now

‘Madness is a childish thing,’ Barbara Taylor writes in The Last Asylum, a memoir of her two decades as a mental patient. The book records her breakdown, her 21-year-long analysis, her periods as an inmate at Friern Mental Hospital in North London, and in addition provides a condensed history of the treatment of mental illness and the institutions associated with it. Taylor was in the bin during the final days of the old Victorian asylums, before they were shut down in the 1990s, and their patients scattered to the cold liberty of the underfunded, overlooked region of rented accommodation or life on the street known as ‘community care’. Loony-bins. ‘Bins’, we called them for short, as Taylor does, just as we called mental illness ‘madness’ and ‘being crazy,’ We recall our secret stashes of meds we’d only pretended to swallow and were keeping in bulk for a rainier day, and reminisce together about the time we tipped too far into our roles and were held down by half a dozen nurses while another injected us with a major tranquilliser [....]

I say ‘we’, because reading The Last Asylum was an uncanny experience for me. I spent inmate time in several asylums, mostly in the late 1960s, long before Barbara Taylor’s breakdown (although we are of a similar age), later in Friern itself, only a few years before her various stays there, and also in the controversial ‘patient-run’ Paddington Day Hospital [....]