Feature
Mindy Lewis: Inside a Life Inside
by Amanda Bader; Photos by Michael Weisbrot

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It’s a given that adolescence is difficult and painful: rebellion, critical parental scrutiny, an overall feeling of not living up to expectations. It’s a time of excess—drug use, arguments, and lots of psychic pain. But most of us take it for granted that we’ll come out of it on the other side more or less a whole adult.

Mindy Lewis’ compelling new memoir is about what happens when adolescent rebellion is not treated as routine. Her version of teenage acting out led to a more than two-year incarceration in the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia–Presbyterian Medical Center (which she calls PI) when she was almost 16 years old. The book, Life Inside, explores Lewis’ life, telling a story of an upbringing quite different from most, and its effects.

“This book is about what happens when adolescent angst is pushed to a limit at a time when margins and psychological definitions were much narrower,” Lewis explained recently when we met on New York’s Upper West Side. “Many of them [in the hospital] were just kids who didn’t fit in.”

The book chronicles a reasonably happy childhood in Manhattan, her father’s departure for California, and the dissolution of her parents’ marriage. The arrival of a stepfather did not provide any cushion as her relationship with her mother started to disintegrate when she began high school, smack in the middle of the ‘60s. Though her painting ability had secured her acceptance at the High School of Music and Art, she soon began to feel as though she didn’t fit in. She just didn’t feel hip enough for the other kids and heady atmosphere that pervaded the school. Lewis was spending more time in Central Park than she did in school, and had discovered an escape in marijuana, LSD, and a collection of other drugs.

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“I was a tragic, romantic waif. I saw the adult world as pure hypocrisy, greed, and ugliness, and I thought that the world was doomed. Everything was superficial and covered over. I thought it was more true to be deeply feeling.”

Her parents sent her to a psychiatrist to try to find a way to reach her, and though he didn’t seem to think that she was “crazy”, he recommended institutionalizing her when she was suspended from Music and Art and made a perfunctory attempt at suicide. She was committed to PI on Court Remand as an official ward of the state. By turning her daughter over in this way, Lewis’s mother was prevented from changing her mind about the treatment; Lewis would remain in state custody until she turned 18.

Though she was committed for a finite time, the book makes it clear that this was not just a two-year stint. Her incarceration affected everything about her life from the minute she was admitted until the present day.

At 50, Lewis has kept her youth with her. She is tall, trim, and strong; belly dancing is a passion and bike riding and swimming help, as well. Her manner is direct, tempered by a quietness that bespeaks a life path that has not always been clear or easy. At some point during our conversation, she observes that she has held onto the styles of her youth, wearing her hair long and free, with little makeup, and dressing in sixties styles.

Several things strike the reader during the journey through the book: the remarkable level of detail about Lewis’ experiences at PI (and the bizarre aspects of life there); the difficult adulthood that seemed as excruciating as it was inevitable following such a contorted adolescence; and the courage that it must have taken to commit all of it to paper.

Always a creative soul, Lewis expressed her emotions in painting, rarely in writing. “I wrote some poetry and read lots of other writers. I always put them on a pedestal, but have been fearful of my own written self-expression.”

But an intense cyber-romance in the early ‘90s led her to begin to express her emotions in writing. The e-mail romance did turn real, but didn’t last. Realizing something was being unlocked by all the writing, she had saved her correspondences with her cyber-mate and started writing a novel inspired by the experience.

She began to take workshops, writing essays and the occasional short story. “It was like somebody had taken a key and unlocked this tremendously energized verbal place in myself. Somehow the self-expression of painting had become too non-specific for me. I was exploring the difference between a paintbrush and a sharp pencil.”

Positive reinforcement in the workshops and small successes getting published made her take her writing a little more seriously. When she saw a classified ad in Poets and Writers calling for submissions for an anthology on women’s experiences with the psychiatric establishment, she couldn’t ignore it.

“Writing about my experiences as an adolescent was the thing that I most avoided. The whole thing was so emotionally charged for me. I would sit there on a park bench with my notebook and write a few sentences and it would just be too painful; I would start to weep,” Lewis recalls. It was only with the support and encouragement of a former writing teacher that she was able to write the 28-page manuscript that was included in anthology, Women’s Encounters with the Mental Health Establishment: Escaping the Yellow Wallpaper (Haworth Press, 2002). Elayne Clift, the editor of the book, encouraged Lewis to do more with her material. Ultimately she joined the International Women’s Writing Guild, through which she met her agent and succeeded in securing a contract for Life Inside.

“I think when I started writing this book, it was about my pain and what had been done to me, but as I wrote, it was more and more with love for the other people who had been in there with me,” says Lewis, quietly. “I have always had a sense of injustice about what happened, and about the ones who didn’t make it.”

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Was it hard to remember the details of her life at PI? “The past was more real than the present in some ways. As soon as I started exploring that time, memories came back to me in great detail. It was almost an ecstatic experience to go back to a time that was so full of feeling for me. I would put on ‘60s music in the morning, and it just brought that time right back.” In addition, she had her hospital files, which are quoted throughout the book. “It took me a long time to look at them, but when I did, the detail was amazing. All of our actions and moods were actually recorded by the staff.”

Lewis describes the eerie feeling of reading about herself in Life Inside:
“Under microscopic scrutiny, details are magnified. I read descriptions of my behavior: She was openly hostile…was self-conscious and unable to face the therapist, sitting with her head bowed while rocking in her chair…acting out and anger as a defense against her disorganized thought and intense dependency…secretive and withholding…anxious…autistic…severe feelings of depersonalization. Page after page of notes describe my progress or lack of progress…
“It sickens me to read it. Described from the outside, my behavior was extreme; if accurate, I’d been much ‘sicker’ than I thought. Although the events are accurately described, my version and theirs are different. I’d experienced it all from inside, they from outside.” (p.333)

Everyone she has contacted during the research process has responded well. She spoke with her psychiatrists, each of whom apologized and talked about how strange that time was for them, as well. They were students, some of who had never seen patients before they were confronted with a collection of angry, disenfranchised, rebellious teenagers. Lewis says that these conversations helped her see different points of view about the whole experience, though her anger about the injustice of it is always close to the surface.

The depths of the bonds formed during the time at PI are evident as she carefully leafs through photographs of her friends from the time and talks wistfully about those whom didn’t make it. Lewis gently extracts a few pictures from the pile, snapshots of an elusive-looking dark-haired girl. “This is Marjee. Isn’t she beautiful? I still can’t believe she’s gone. Sometimes I think I see her on the street.” We take a quiet moment to gaze at the images, and then Lewis reaches for the next photo.
A visit to the hospital just before it was renovated is described in detail at the end of the book. The tour is not easy for her, but it is clearly a critical milestone in Lewis’s ability to find perspective on her time at PI. One can almost hear the footsteps and feel her eerie wonderment as she revisits the place that formed such a critical and painful time in her life. Her felling of release is palpable as she leaves the building for the last time and continues forward.

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Lewis remains skeptical about the value of psychiatry. She calls it a pseudo-science, observing that psychiatric trends reflect the times in which they exist. She feels that the current emphasis on productivity precludes the validity of self-exploration. She condemns the current emphasis on medication, putting forth the belief that: “Psychological and spiritual pain in life is real and important. There must be room for it and people need to know that they can live through [bad] times. Things pass.” She admits that this antipathy toward antidepressants and tranquilizers is a direct response to the heavy use of Thorazine as the foundation of “treatment” at PI.

After years of therapy, searching and examining her feelings and emotions and still feeling like there was something wrong with her when she was unhappy, Lewis simply stopped going to sessions one day. And she feels that was the beginning of a much healthier phase of her life. “I just had to learn to rely on myself and that I wasn’t crazy and that I don’t have to fit in. That was the biggest thing. I spent a large amount of time needing to be who I was and make mistakes and wind up in difficult and painful situations…and still realize that I was okay.”

Lewis has clearly found herself in writing the book. “When I started writing, it was like a part of me that wasn’t connected came alive again. It was like completing a circuit. One of my favorite little jokes now is: ‘I used to think I was crazy, until I discovered…I’m a writer,’” she says with a sly chuckle. “It has been tremendously healing to write the book. It has taken away the sense of despair, isolation, and marginality. I feel like I’ve been affirmed. And, it has transformed my relationship with my mother.”

For years Lewis blamed her mother for abandoning her to the state. This outrage was finally mitigated when she learned, during her research for the book, that her mother had actually been ambivalent about relinquishing her rights. She had only done so under pressure from the hospital authorities.

In fact it wasn’t until Lewis began the book in earnest that she and her mother came to terms with the complex feelings that permeated their relationship. “After I got the book contract, I went to Florida to interview my mother. Things really erupted while I was there—we had a serious screamer of a fight. That night, neither of us could sleep and we actually bumped into each other in the kitchen in the middle of the night. She asked me, ‘What have I done to you that’s so terrible? I don’t know why you hate me so much.’ I said, ‘Mom, if you don’t allow me to be an adult, I can’t continue having a relationship with you.’”

Lewis’ return to New York was followed by a deep, clinical depression that was set off by the guilt and terror she had about writing the book. “I felt like my values were so screwed up that I’d rather write a book and hurt my mother. I also had this feeling that, if I had a real life, I wouldn’t have to write this book.”

She actually wasn’t sure she could go through with it, until she followed friends’ encouragement to write the story, not just for herself but for the others who had been with her and for those who are in a similar situation now.

She proceeded to send her mother four chapters for comments and was gratified to receive a long, handwritten letter back, giving her version of the story. Some of those revisions were incorporated to the benefit of the chapters. What had really happened, however, was that Lewis felt her mother had chosen to put her daughter’s success and happiness above her own, putting aside her fear and anxiety about being seen as a bad mother. “Our relationship really became transformed; I realized how much I love my mother.”

There’s a sense of anticipation and excitement about where the book will lead her. Lewis plans to continue her work as a painter and as a graphic artist, doing much of her designing for various arts and nonprofit organizations. She also has ideas for future writing. She admits to an occasional concern that this is the only big, serious book she’s got in her, but is enthusiastic about exploring what else she has to write. She is thinking about two novels, which will have to wait until the round of readings and interviews supporting Life Inside subsides.

“In [Life Inside] I hoped to give something—clues to parents of adolescents, or to adolescents themselves who are in pain.” She continues, “I wanted to let them know that there are kindred spirits—they’re not alone. There is a path out of the dark. If the worst situation in my life can become a positive, it’s like alchemy. It gives me faith that miracles can happen in life.”