Certified
Dear Sir,?The review of my book, Certified, given in your March issue, seems to demand a statement from its author : if otherwise, the author has wasted six years and ?250 in a fruitless endeavour to improve our Mental Health Services and the lot of the mentally ill.
Although this book has been brilliantly reviewed throughout the world, and despite the fact that your reviewer is the only one to accord it an ” adverse ” review, I must at once agree with him that it certainly does not offer anything in the way of constructive ideas. Therefore, I shall be glad if you will publish this letter, so that your readers may become aware of my purpose. Today, there is a spate of books written by ex-patients :
The Snake Pit, The Kingdom of the Lost, Certified, and (now due from Allen & Unwin) Inside the Asylum, by John Vincent. These authors have lived in our mental hospitals and thus gained first-hand experience of the conditions prevailing. They have witnessed the defects in our Mental Health Services ; and consequently, none of them finds any reason to praise the system. On the contrary, they are shocked, horrified and angered that things so wrong should be possible in our mental hospitals as they are constituted today.
Now, although I do not doubt the sincerity of your reviewer (for it is evident that we have the same aim that of promoting by any means the improvement of the mental health of the community) I do feel it necessary to say that there are no inaccuracies in my book, that I have deliberately minimized matters, that it is a terrible fact that there was no treatment for mental disorders in ” my ” asylum, nor was there any treatment for physical illness?other than a first aid room.
With regard to your reviewer’s justifiable suggestion that part of my book may have been inspired by my own mental disability, I would assure him that I was a perfectly sane man, and that because we were at war when I wrote the book, I was unable to tell the reader how it was that a sane man came to be in an asylum. This is now made clear in my book, That Which is Caesar’s, which appears in a few weeks’ time.
Is it not passing strange that a writer of world-wide reputation (Vera Brittain) should have written the Introduction to John Vincent’s book, Inside the Asylum ? And is it not also strange that many of our largest book shops are staging an exhibition of my next two books? Synthetic Mania and That Which is Caesar’s ? Whole windows are being used, wherein fifty copies of each of these books, together with a poster bearing my photograph and the following advertisement will be seen: “A most courageous and dynamic book.”?
Vera Brittain.
With all respect to your reviewer, who may himself be a medical man well versed in psychological medicine, may I suggest that so resistant is the human mind to things not yet experienced that one can hardly hope for complete understanding without further explanation. Yours trulv.
H. G. WOODLEY. Doune House, Edzell, Angus.
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