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Ex-Inmate in Exile: The Autobiography of Philip A. Kumin

by Philip A. Kumin

138 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #98-0046; ISBN 1-55212-227-1; US$14.50, C$18.50, EUR12.10, £8.40

An autobiography which is an account/expose of the author's experiences in the US mental health system in the 1970s. Peppered with moments of humor, it is rife with revelations critically needing exposure.

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about the book about the author sample chapter review catalogue info

About the Book There are some mental patients who refer to themselves as "former psychiatric inmates". Hence the title of Philip A. Kumin's autobiographical account of his journey through the mental health system, EX-INMATE IN EXILE.

About the Author

Sample Chapter

Chapter One

My father, Howard J. Kumin, was then a labor statistician for the United Nations, assigned to assess and implement labor programs throughout Latin America. I was the youngest of three, my brother, Gerson, having been born in 1941, and my sister, Susie, in 1945.

My earliest recollections are of a house that we lived in, and a car that we owned, in Bogota, Colombia. I was perhaps two years old when we arrived in Colombia for a 14-month stay, on one of my father's regional assignments. I have memories of touring the salt mines of Cali, and of the open-air meat market at a place called "Chia." I have memories of traveling through the lush mountains by train. I remember bending over to look at the red-hot boiler underneath the steam engine, at one point at which we had stopped. I remember being frightened by the hissing of steam.

Perhaps one of my most vivid memories from that time, was of the rural Latin American airport from which we departed, the day of our return to the United States. Immediately beyond a small wooden building which served as a terminal, lay the airport's lone dirt runway. However, off to the right of this same building, an open storage area was located, where several rows of Lockheed Constellations were tethered to the ground. Most of these belonged to the Colombian airline, Avianca. We had time to kill before the departure of our flight, and so Susie walked me around this deserted, quiet, gravel apron. It was there, that day, that I learned the meanings of the words "fuselage" and "aileron," and there that I began a long love affair with airplanes.

We returned, in the late 1950s, to the same northwestern part of Baltimore City where my mother, father, and sister had been living when I was born. At that point, this neighborhood was still predominantly white and Jewish, though already in the beginning stages of transition from white to black.

Susie and I were both born in Baltimore at Sinai Hospital. However, at the time that Gerson was born, my parents were living in the Washington metropolitan area, and thus he was born in a Washington, DC, hospital. Gerson was also the only one of the three of us who was delivered by natural childbirth. Unfortunately, the attending obstetrician used a pair of forceps on my brother's head in an effort to pry him loose from my mother's birth canal, causing him lasting brain damage. To this day, Gerson suffers from a seizure disorder.

Partially because of his misunderstood seizure disorder, and partially because of ill effects that my father had had on my brother's psychological development, it was recommended that Gerson be sent to an experimental extension of the University of Chicago, known as the Orthogenic School, run by the late psychiatrist Dr. Bruno Bettelheim. It was here that he resided at the time of my birth, although he returned shortly thereafter to accompany us to Bogota. When we returned to Baltimore after that, my mother enrolled me in a nearby nursery school, Susie entered the sixth grade, and Gerson began public high school. My father continued to work and travel overseas.

Though my maternal grandfather (whom I never knew, but have always wished I had) was a native Baltimorean, my mother's mother was born and raised in London, England. It was here as well that my mother, Hazel Edna Goldman, the first of four girls, was born, though my grandparents returned to Baltimore soon thereafter. Mother was born in 1913, and it wasn't long before the rest of the Lyon family, including my great Aunt Miriam, followed my grandmother, Lillian, to America.

My paternal grandparents, Sadie and Max Kumin, were born and raised in the Baltic country of Latvia, later annexed by the Soviet Union. My father, the first of three boys, was born in Brockton, Massachusetts, in 1907, after my grandparents had emigrated to the U.S. Though Susie, Gerson, and I were always raised much more closely to our mother's side of the family than our father's, we nonetheless visited our aunts, uncles, and cousins in New England.

My recollection of my father's father is that he was the complete personal opposite of his wife. Though extremely hard of hearing, whenever one was able to communicate with him, one discovered what a very warm, jovial, affable person he was. By contrast, my vague memory of my grandmother is that she was always angry, chiding, castigating of other people, and never satisfied with anyone else's performance, just as my own father has never been.

Sadly, my father has always taken after his mother. His frustration with the realities of life, for whatever existential reasons, has never permitted him to carry on a normal social discourse with others. He has remained a social anarchist.

Chapter Nine

Once while a day student at the Grange School in Santiago, I commented to my parents that I wondered what it would be like to attend boarding school. My mother and father had never forgotten this remark, and as my mother's physical health continued to deteriorate, my idea was resurrected. My mother approached the Alexandria Community Mental Health Center for referrals, and of those given us by them, we narrowed our choice down to a school located in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. We were told that Dr. Hans K. Maeder, the director of the Stockbridge School, would be recruiting for students in the Washington area, in April of that year. Soon after having had an interview with him, we received word that I had been accepted for admission. Accordingly, in September of that year, 1967, I got my first taste of life away from home.

When I arrived at the Stockbridge School, I was suddenly thrust into the midst of a peer social environment I had never been exposed to before. Fourteen years old at the time, I was still dressing in the preppy, buttoned-down-collar style of dress favored by Southern men and boys in states like Virginia, back in the 1960s. When I arrived in Stockbridge, I encountered 139 tough students, predominantly from the New York metropolitan area, who wore way-out outfits, and listened to bizarre music by artists with such names as "The Jimi Hendrix Experience," "Cream," "The Doors," "The Jefferson Airplane," and "Country Joe and the Fish." Most of these kids also came from rich families, which meant that they had the money to buy something else I hadn't ever encountered before either: drugs.

The Berkshires are beautiful, and the memories of gazing out of my open dormitory window at the surrounding forested hills in autumn, are what have sustained me ever since. I would sit and gaze through the window on a crisp afternoon, sometime in October of 1967. The rhapsody of "The Masked Marauder" would tumble in from the open window of one of the other student's rooms, on the floor above me. On a weekend afternoon, Randy Connell, his roommate, Dave Pedroni, Mike Martin, and I would hike and climb for two hours to the summit of one of the Berkshire hills immediately behind the school's campus, returning in time for dinner in the school's dining hall. When I reflect back on those golden afternoons now, I remember the sunlight filtering through the trees as we moved on through the forest. As we left the dormitory further and further behind us, the strains of, perhaps, "You're Lost, Little Girl" would grow faint and more and more distant as we jaunted farther and farther along.

Hans Maeder always told us that we were students in Stockbridge, in order to be educated for democracy. The philosophers, Bertrand Russell and Albert Schweitzer, were idols of his, and he quoted liberally from them. In addition to regularly scheduled classes, sports, and extracurricular activities, weekly school meetings were held in the lounge area of one of the larger dormitories. Modeled after New England Town Meetings, Hans would always remind us, nonetheless, that he retained the final veto power over any collective decisions made that he did not feel would be in the school's best interest. However, with this exception, these two-hour meetings would be true exercises in parliamentary procedure and participatory democracy. During our best meetings, we truly debated the fate of the world, and what our position in that should be.

One decision made by the school as a whole, in January of 1968, was for those students who chose to, to be able to participate in demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. This was a decision which Hans condoned, and for the next several Saturdays, we bused to nearby Pittsfield for these marches, which grew larger each week. Later on that year, Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection. This then became my first taste of what we refer to today as "empowerment."

Review

A heart rendering autobiography by the author who had mental problems and the tribulations of confinement by various mental institutions in the State Maryland and the treatment by the health care professionals involved.

--journal of Irreproducible Results, volume 44/number 4

Catalogue Information