I found the whole idea obnoxious. Basically you have an Axis II personality disorder in a person with their own agenda who is sensationalizing her treatment in a system which is not meant to treat her issues. If her first psychiatrist had had the guts to tell her she had a personality disorder, and treat her accordingly, she wouldn't have had cause to write the book.
Vincent is a voyeur, a self-professed con artist with "a serial killer's people skills" and "a Schopenhauerian outlook on life," as she wrote in "Self-Made Man." If she truly thought, at the outset, that note-taking prurience would carry her through the writing of this new book, she may have gambled too much on the demon without. She's a 10-year veteran of the modern psychiatric system, beginning in her late 20s with a diagnosis of depression — which covered up a deep well of anger, feminine or not. ....
At the unfortunate cost of narrative suspense, Vincent discloses her biases early: like a growing number of Americans, she's fairly certain that America's love affair with modern-day psychiatry is nothing less than a subprime crisis, with the F.D.A., the DSM, Big Pharma and your harried family doctor in on the scam. She'll even go so far as to describe depression as "bratty rebellion," many diagnoses as "a guess" and most psychiatric drugs as "of dubious or at best limited efficacy and usually unfathomed toxicity."
...It is astounding how little it takes for Vincent to begin to recover at her last stop, a cognitive-behavioralist facility advertised for patients in mental distress but in practice a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center — a little bit of sympathy, a movement class, a therapist who finally zeroes in on the anger and breaks down the emotions around it.
