Going Down Coming Up

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When Mary Barnes was 18, her younger brother Peter, then 16, had a nervous breakdown and was committed to a psych ward; within a few years, he was consigned to long-term institutional care. Mary and Peter's parents were told that their son had a chronic psychotic disorder that would continue worsening until he became "vegetable-like," best left under constant medical supervision. Mary later writes, "He incarnated all the anger I felt but couldn't feel." At this point, Mary was a young adult and holding down a job as a nurse and a nursing teacher-but she began to experience the strong desire to hit her mother, an impulse she resisted. She felt she'd been asked to keep up the front of a loving, functional family for so long, and now her entire system was rebelling. She stopped speaking. In 1952, at the age of 29, she voluntarily committed herself to a West London mental hospital and was diagnosed as schizophrenic.