Warner Stephanie PYC 242 C Dr. David Knight 22 October 2007 Is There No Place On Earth For Me? Is There No Place On Earth For Me? by Susan Sheehan, is a book about a girl named Sylvia Frumkin. The book tells of her life and struggles with schizophrenia. Susan Sheehan tells of Miss. Frumkin's struggles from when she first had symptoms in her teens all the way through adulthood. Sheehan goes into the inner workings of a schizophrenic and brings the reader into the often misunderstood and frightening world of schizophrenia. As the book progresses the reader sees how mental illness can affect and sometimes tear apart a family. The book starts off when Sylvia is in her mid-thirties, when Sheehan first meets her. We met Sylvia at one of her lows. She is speaking in "word salad", and talking about how she dated Paul McCartney. As the book continues we follow Sylvia as she is placed in hospitals and then removed from hospitals and institutions over and over again. We see how the doctors never look at her records; she is often misdiagnosed and even given medicines that pervious doctors found not to be effective on her. Sheehan takes the readers back into Sylvia's childhood, and the reader can see how the illness was triggered. From her neglectful parents to the pressures at school, Sylvia could not handle the pressure and signs of schizophrenia emerged. As the book comes to a close we see that Sylvia is again back at Creedmoor, and the reader knows she will have to deal with this up and down pattern the rest of her life.
Warner 2 This book was hard for me to read at first. I often became confused in the "word salad" of Sylvia's monologues. I had a hard time keeping the chronology of Sylvia's life together because Sheehan started the book when she first met Sylvia and then often jumped around to different periods of Sylvia's life. As I got more into the book, Sylvia's life and her personality became more and more fascinating to me. I would start reading and I would not want to put the book down. I wanted to see what would happen next and what sort of things Sylvia would do. I have never encountered anyone in real life that was schizophrenic, and the only people I have seen that were schizophrenic were from movies and on TV. Reading this book showed me what schizophrenia really was. I became fascinated by the way Sylvia's mind worked how she made relations between words that would not make sense to a normal person. I was fascinated by the grandiose thoughts Sylvia would come up with. She would be talking about how everyone needs sex and then start talking about how she knows Mary Poppins. It was almost entertaining to read her monologues, but also sad in some ways. This book also showed me a little more about the system behind mental institutions and mental illness. Throughout the book Sylvia was sent to various different mental health hospitals and institutions. Every time she would enter or re-enter a hospital she would have an evaluation or the doctor would prescribe her different medications and treatments. Often times the doctor would not look at her past records of what drugs and treatments she had been put on to base what he/she wanted to prescribe to Sylvia. Other times the drugs that Sylvia were on were not working so they would just up the dosage. After reading this, it really frustrated me. I felt like the doctors could have done so much more for Sylvia if they would have just looked at her records. At different times in her
Warner 3 life she was on drugs that worked for her and so she was released from the institution. Then when she relapsed and had to go back to an institution, the next doctor put her on some other drug that she had been on before that did not work in the past. If they would have just looked at her records and saw which drugs worked for her she probably would not have had to go through as much as she It did. also frustrated me that the doctors were never quite sure what drugs were actually working for Sylvia and which ones were not. I felt like this was because they kept switching her doses and medications all the time and could not keep anything straight. This makes me feel like so much more could be done for the mentally ill. It makes me wonder how many people go through health care and, like Sylvia, are not getting the treatments and prescriptions they need, only because the system of how things are handled with the mentally ill is flawed. It also made me sad to see how Sylvia's family treated her. Although they tried as hard as they could to get her help, in the early ages of Sylvia's life they caused most of her problems that lead her to become schizophrenic in the first place. I was saddened by the fact that both Sylvia's father and her mother did not want her in the first place. Sylvia, from the very beginning had to compete with her older sister, Joyce, for affection from her parents, because Joyce was the "perfect" child. Sylvia was always compared to Joyce's achievements and her parents would make comments about how she was not as good as Joyce. I could not relate to what Sylvia went through as a child because I was fortunate enough to have parents that showed that they loved me, but I could understand that feeling of not being good enough. I think everyone sometimes feels that, especially when you do not live up to other people's expectations of you. In Sylvia's case it was worse, because her parents didn't even want her in the first place.
Warner 4 Throughout her life Sylvia was let out of the institutions and able live at home, but most of the time her family did not want her there. This was mostly due to the fact that Sylvia's illness tore the family apart. I guess I can understand what Sylvia's family was going through, and I can kind of understand why they would want Sylvia to just stay in a hospital. Sylvia was a very difficult person to live with and I can see why her family would rather someone else have to deal with it, but to me family is one of the most important things in your life. It made no sense to me that Sylvia's family did as much as possible to make sure she was not living in their home. I feel like if it were me I would want to do as much as I could to help my family member, because I would want what was best for them and I would want them to get better. What really shocked me was the way Mrs. Frumkin treated Sylvia when Sylvia was trying to be nice. Sylvia had brought home a cake from Baskin Robbins and had given it to her mother for her mother's anniversary, birthday, and mother's day. When Sylvia gave it to her mom all Mrs. Frumkin did was complain and ranted for thirty minutes about it. This incident showed me how much Sylvia's mother disliked and underappreciated Sylvia as a person. I could not imagine being treated like that or even treating someone else, let alone a family member that way, especially if they had a mental illness. I can see Mrs. Frumkin's side to the situation, but in all honesty I think the way she treated Sylvia throughout Sylvia's life was wrong. Sylvia's story opens a person's eyes to what really goes on with mental illness. Schizophrenia is a hard disease for an individual and those around to deal with. It makes matters worse when the individual's family is not all that helpful towards getting the person better, and the system that is supposed to help the individual is not much help
Warner 5 either, and in a sense might even make matters worse. Although, after the book was published Sylvia finally got some good help and was stabilized and able to live a normal life, it makes me wonder how many others out there have not got the help they need to live a normal life. How many people out there are so ill and without help, that they don't have a place on earth for them?