This book review is reprinted from Mad in Argentina. ‘Beyond reason’, with a foreword by RD Laing, was published in 1964 and describes the author’s journey through the psychiatric system and the meanings she made of her madness.
The book was published in England in 1964 and in Argentina in 1975 by Amorrortu editores with a print run of 4,000 copies, a significant number for the publishing industry in Argentina at that time. At the time of writing this review, no biographical information was found on Morag Coate, its author. Given the characteristics of everything the author exposes in the book about her own experience with madness, the name chosen for the publication could be a pseudonym.
Psychiatrist Roland Laing’s introduction notes that the book “gives us one of the best accounts of personal experience of madness that exists.” Among other books on personal experiences of madness are titles such as Schreber’s Memoirs of a Nervous Patient, Chamberlin’s On Our Own, Nijinsky’s Notebooks, or Packard’s The Hidden Life of Prisoners, or Revelations from the Asylum. Although Morag Coate’s descriptions of her personal experiences of madness are very detailed, this makes them no better or worse than other descriptions of these experiences.
As the title suggests, the book is a chronicle of the author’s experiences in returning to sanity. The first part of the book is titled “Story of a Life” in which five psychiatric hospitalizations over 14 years are described. There, the author constructs meaning from the different crises she had in order to finally be able to live a normal life without renouncing life, grace and love, which are presented as states of grace that transcend all reason. The Catholic vision of her experience with madness runs through the entire book.
The second part of the book is entitled “Commentary” where the author shares her reflections and conclusions about her experiences related to delusions, hallucinations, treatments and spirituality. It is here that Coate delves into the relationships between Christian spirituality and mental illness, based on her own cardinal experiences and cosmic crises as she calls them. The search for the meaning of existence in the doctrine of Christianity is constitutive of this book. However, no relationships are drawn between the stigmas that Christianity recognizes with the stigmas that the author herself received for being considered mentally ill; in fact, she herself recognizes herself as a victim of an illness from which she was able to recover. The starting point of the author of this book is that the irrational and madness are the two constitutive elements of mental illness, but that from the acceptance of mental illness and adherence to treatments, they can be reconciled with faith in God so that the person recovers their normal life.
The difference between Morag Coate’s book and other books that relate personal experiences in relation to madness is fundamentally ideological. Beyond Reason is a book that limits itself to narrating the author’s personal experience in relation to the mental health system, without carrying out a critical analysis of the characteristics of the mental health services that the author herself suffered. There is a constant justification in the chronicle of the procedures to which psychiatric patients are subjected, because the author adheres to the idea of psychosis as a disintegration of the personality that must be reintegrated at all costs and with any means necessary, even electroconvulsive therapy that the author herself suffered. This perspective that makes individual experience the justification of a sanitarism that legitimizes cruel, degrading and inhuman practices and treatment does not appear in other authors who write about their experiences in madness. Therein lies the difference between this book and other similar ones.
Morag Coate’s perspective is critical of psychiatric institutions, but legitimizes practices that come from psychiatry, which she considers perfectible. The author does not recognize herself as a survivor of electroshocks, as, for example, the poet Antonin Artaud did several years earlier in the book “Artaud, the momo.” Morag Coate always emphasizes how she alone, with her own resources and the support of psychiatry, found the path to her individual recovery and celebrates having returned to being a normal, healthy and sane person.
Reading the book, however, is highly recommended because it questions humanistic ideas about the treatment that insane people receive in the mental health system. It is a powerful book that forces us to review ideas about states of insanity. There is no doubt that it is a book that makes us think, if we can read it without shocks and with patience. At times it reminds us of Margaret Thatcher’s statements when she said that there is no society, only individuals and families.
However, a caveat and perhaps a warning must be made. Morag Coate’s ideas are liberal to the point of justifying aberrant practices. This book may offend the sensibilities of certain people who have suffered psychiatric oppression.