The Loony-Bin Trip
The Loony-Bin Trip is a memoir by Kate Millett, published in 1990. It shares her true experiences with involuntary psychiatric commitment and her strong critique of how psychiatry and the system treat people.
The book starts on Millett’s sustainable farm in Poughkeepsie, New York. She decides to stop taking lithium after being involuntarily committed twice by her family. She finds the medication’s side effects, like trembling hands and brain fog, make her work as a painter and writer hard. She also describes her relationship with Sophie Keir, which has grown tense and full of arguments. In trying to mend things, Millett stops taking the drug, and her family and partner worry she is acting foolishly.
The memoir then moves into flashbacks about earlier hospital stays. Millett remembers the first time she was put in a psychiatric facility badly. She had a job at St. Peter’s Asylum when she was younger, and she recalls how poorly patients were treated there. She writes about her own first “bust,” which lasted ten days before she agreed to sign as a voluntary patient. Her mother, sister, and husband, Fumio Yoshimura, had her admitted without her consent. That same year another stay happened in St. Paul, Minnesota, for two weeks. A lawyer named Donald Heffernan won her freedom in a sanity trial and helped change Minnesota laws about involuntary commitment without a trial.
Seven years later, Millett’s younger sister Mallory tries to have her admitted again, worried about her stopping lithium. Dr. Pulp accompanies Mallory, and two ambulances wait outside. Hearing the sirens, Millett must fight the urge to cry or scream. Yet with New York State laws and a protective police officer, she avoids being sent to the loony bin.
Millett planned to fly to Ireland to speak to the Irish Labour Party, but at Shannon Airport she is arrested and sent to an asylum she calls “the worst bin of all.” She dreams of escaping, but is quickly recaptured. A friend, actress Margaretta D’Arcy, and other supporters rescue her by moving her to a better facility with a better chance of release. Millett acknowledges these saviors in the book’s acknowledgments.
While she is institutionalized, a psychiatrist diagnoses manic depression (now called bipolar disorder). Millett insists she does not have manic depression, arguing that her mental health problems stem from being treated like a patient in institutions. She also worries about how stopping the medication will look to her partner and others, wondering if she will be seen as manic simply for choosing to stop the drug.
A key moment in the story comes from a passage Millett describes about psychiatric hospitals: they feel like places designed for you to go “crazy,” where society uses illness to justify control and forced treatment.
In the final years, Millett’s long marriage to Yoshimura ends in divorce. Although they had separated for years, she does not want him to see her in a weakened state. By the end of the memoir, she begins to feel she is getting better. A visit from Rae, a former lover who had also been institutionalized, inspires her to write The Loony-Bin Trip.
The book was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Non-Fiction.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 07:53 (CET).