A review by mysta
Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness by Lauren Slater

2.0

The book was interesting when she actually talked directly about the patients, and she had a few flashes of insight regarding general psychological theories that I was glad to have come across. But overall very little of the book seemed to be concrete stories, only vignettes of a few encounters with a few individuals and very little detail about how (or even if) those individuals changed over the course of their therapy. I was often left with more questions about the nature of the individual's disorder than answers, and I think there was an attempt to make up for this lack of detail with flowery and distracting language. The book would have benefited from cutting at least half of the similes and metaphors, and replacing them with actual information and a followable "plot" outlining each individual's growth. While sometimes poetic and an appropriate way to describe something that is often difficult to describe, the farther into the book I read, the more nonsensical, pretentious, and uncomfortably personal these metaphors became. It often felt like I was reading a high school English assignment in which a student was grasping to find imagery - any imagery - in order to meet a requirement, rather than to actually enrich the text.