Everything is made of language. In the morning you hear those damned birdies tweedlydee tweedlydoo to each other or some damned cats meowing but that's not language. It may be communication but it has no grammar and it can only describe the here and now (the hear and know). The birdies are tweebing about the cats, "look there's a kitty cat watch out" and the cats are meowing about the birdies ("I see a lot of edible things in trees") and it doesn't get much more interesting than that. They will never write a novel. Whereas humans are the opposite, they almost never talk about the here and now. It's always "I'm sure this wasn't as expensive as last time we were here" or "you have to get your suit cleaned for next week". Human language is a really dangerous device, it's explosive, because not only can you talk about things that aren't in the here and now, you can with very little effort talk about things that couldn't possibly exist ever. The owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat. They took some honey and plenty of money wrapped up in a five pound note. Well, it's just nonsense, because you wouldn't wrap up honey in a five pound note, it would gunge up the five pound note, no retailer would accept it, and anyway, an owl and a pussycat would never be able to hire a boat. They wouldn't have a clue about navigation - how could they use oars? Is this a motorised boat? Was it a tidal estuary? Anyway, I'm getting distracted - by language. And this proves my point. Language means that hardly anything we say is true. I wish I was dead. My mother's going to kill me. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. I am no longer in control of my own brain, something else is. All commonly used phrases, a million of them, none of them literally true. Well, we hope not. We hope there are very few mothers who will kill their children, actually kill them, if they're an hour late. The metaphorical aspect of language, which is its limitless joy and psychedelic legerdemain that we all are in love with, or why would we be readers, leads us humanish beings into some unhappy dark places. All that beating of heads against walls about the Trinity in Christianity for instance. It's a metaphor - three aspects of God - not three Gods - it's a poetic way of expressing an ineffable reality (if you're a Christian) - but the metaphor escaped and took on a life of its own and became a source of much befuddlement. Susanna Kaysen artfully informs us how the madness gets in. It's when you can't tell what is language describing something that is from language describing something that might be or could be or never could be. She gives an example - that bureau in the corner looks like a tiger (simile). No - that bureau in the corner IS a tiger! This whole book is about whether we are brains or minds. Brains are very very very very very very very complex machines. But minds are something else. Drugs can fix brains like oil can fix an engine. But drugs can't fix minds. 
 The only power they had was to dope us up. Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium : the therapists' friends. Once we were on it, it was hard to get off. A bit like heroin, except it was the staff who got addicted to our taking it. 
 This is a gigantic debate and may, of course, be another metaphor that has taken on an undeserved life of its own. (Is there a ghost in the machine? Well, I don't believe in ghosts. But if a thing walks like a ghost and quacks like a ghost, then maybe.) 
 Language leads this memoir astray. Susanna's account of her 18 month stay in the loony bin (her jocular term, don't look at me like that) is so wry, "cool, elegant and unexpectedly funny" (Sunday Times), "triumphantly funny" (NYT), "darkly comic" (Newsweek), so mordant, so witty, that it without meaning to verges on presenting hospitalization for mental illness as a hip alternative to college. The tag line on the back of my copy is : "Sometimes the only way to stay sane is to go a little crazy". Hmmph, I should say not. Like it's some kind of choice. Like you're aligning mentally ill people with hipsters, beatniks, drop-outs, Left Bank artistic sufferers, hey, Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath - all those cool types. That's the blurb writer getting carried away. Like all of us. Carried away by the onrushing ever tumbling surge of human language which is the ruin and the salvation of us all.