A Memoir of Trauma, Healing, and the Outdoors
April 15, 2024
In this bracing, brilliant, and fury-inducing memoir, Lyon details what led him, at 15, to be transferred in the 1980s to a psychiatric facility after he gave his skateboard to a friend. The recounting of violent abuse masked as treatment is appalling enough, but Lyon is a former plaintiff in the class action lawsuit against National Medical Enterprises (now Tenet Healthcare), which was ultimately fined $379 million by the federal government for fraud and patient abuse. NME made a habit of paying "bounties" to professionals who referred children to their care and then convinced parents to sign them over for inpatient treatment until their insurance ran dry. In lacerating prose, Lyon recounts his childhood with divorced and neglectful parents who easily fell for the recommendations of those insisting that their son's gift proved he was suicidal. After spending one year inside, Lyon's insurance was exhausted, and he was released. He set out to rebuild his life. It took decades and included the deaths of friends who did not survive their return to the "real world." Content now as an outdoor guide, Lyon has written a survival story like no other. With positively outstanding storytelling, this is a book that can not be put down.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
April 15, 2024
A once-institutionalized psychiatric patient exposes a flawed, corrupt system. Now in his early 50s, Lyon, a backpacking guide and instructor, was an ordinary kid, torn between divorced parents who lived in different states and didn't know what to do with him. "My life wasn't perfect. I still missed California," he writes. "But settling in Dallas was better than being bounced from house to house like an unwanted package." His parents' solution was to move the understandably disaffected kid into a psychiatric facility for a few weeks, only to watch as a few weeks turned into a year. As the author notes, the standard mode of treatment was to force the teenager to sit in a chair day in and day out, the better to ponder the error of his youthful ways. Lyon serves up sharp portraits of his wardens, from the bureaucratic head who placed him in the worst unit in the place to the supposed therapist who imposed one meaningless punishment after another. Placed in a halfway house, he confronted what passed for the real world--and eventually won a legal judgment for psychiatric malpractice, a short-lived victory that preceded a series of spirit-killing defeats. "I hated being the poster boy for psychiatry gone wrong," he writes; still, he did much to expose that malfeasance then, just as he does in these well-considered pages. One feels for Lyon as he describes coping with inconceivably terrible loss. Years later, he learned the true, and truly indefensible, reason for his having been confined in the first place. The author, who went on to become an outdoor guide, is also gracious about his difficult life, writing, meaningfully, "today is a very different place than I ever could have imagined." A heartfelt memoir and an urgent demand for higher standards of juvenile mental health care.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.