"It was May 1978, the day before my graduation, what was supposed to be one of the happiest days of my life. But I wasn't happy. On the contrary, I knew that I was insane, destined to leave Mount Holyoke and end up in a psychiatric Institution." So begins Elizabeth A. Richter's memoir of her descent into madness and her battle back to recovery. As she now understands it, she was supposed to have been treated and released within a matter of weeks, but instead ended up with a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia and remained hospitalized or two years. Ms. Richter finds an explanation for her emotional difficulties within the context of growing up in a family haunted by the atrocities of the Nazi era and struggling to come to terms with the illness of a younger brother who was born with multiple brain tumors and who eventually died at home just before his 12th birthday. At the same time, her mother experienced life-long depression and self-medicated with both drugs and alcohol. Throughout her teenage years, Elizabeth was scapegoated by her family, disrespected, and subjected to both verbal abuse and domestic violence, particularly by her older brother who was consumed with anger towards their difficult circumstances. After graduation from College, because of her misdiagnosis, Elizabeth ended up on a long term unit of the McLean Hospital in Boston, North Belknap II. This unit was run by a psychiatrist, widely speculated to be either as crazy as his patients or brilliant-no one quite knew for sure-who pursued a controversial treatment which involved breaking the patient's will, regressing him to childhood, and then re-parenting him back to maturity. This included heavy doses of medication and almost daily psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy as well as group therapy. In this book, Ms. Richter describes life on the Hall, the damaging consequences of NBII's treatment approach, as well as the interesting staff members and patients she met. This book harks back to Sylvia Plath's description of her hospitalization at Mclean 20 years earlier in her book "The Bell Jar," and that of Susanna Kaysen's "Girl, Interupted" which took place 10 years earlier. Furthermore, aside from being a fascinating human interest story, this book will intrigue anyone who has a connection with the mental health professions, either as a therapist or as a consumer.