Joanne Greenberg: I never promised you a rose garden

Hey there, dear bedlamite, I'm glad you're back to take your next dose of lithium. Any improvements since we started the treatment? Hallucinations? Paroxysm? Side effects? It's horrible?? Well, I never promised you a rose garden...

Neither did Joanne Greenberg, so I really don't know why I expected this book to be so great. Partly it is, partly it isn't; anyway, let's get down to business. I never promised you a rose garden by Joanne Greenberg is about a schizophrenic teenager girl, Deborah Blau, who spends three years at 'That Place,' that is, a mental hospital, treated by the competent and sympathetic psychiatrist from Germany, Dr. Fried. 

One of the reasons why I liked the book is that the protagonist's illness is portrayed in an extremely detailed and elaborate way. Deborah doesn't simply hallucinate; she built up a whole new dimension inside her head, called Yr, a kingdom with its own gods, rules, and language. Completely detached from reality, the girl not only has problems feeling what "normal" people feel (such as the pain of burning and cutting oneself), but also distances herself from the English language. She thinks in the language of Yr, which has the capability of expressing things in a more focused way than English does, and, therefore, she often has a hard time trying to find the exact English counterparts of her fictional language. Difficulties of translation and this language barrier becomes one of the most dominant platform of her madness and her isolation from the world of the sane.

The layers and steps of her illness are complex, integrated in her very identity and origin. The first one was having a tyrannic grandfather, who dumped all his long-lost demands on his little grandchild, implanting the thought "You are not of them" in her head. The second one was the racism she had to encounter because of her Jewish origin, proving what great an impact racial prejudices can have. The third door leading towards dementia was having a sexually repressed father, who even though did nothing, but still couldn't hide the arousel his own daughter stimulated in him. These three steps caused her to turn towards an inner dimension, a world where she could ignore reality, where she could cling to life through being insane. Sounds like a paradox, but if you had to choose between the hell of reality, a suicide attempt, or a world made up in your mind, where you live with creations who accept and understand you without conditions, maybe you would make the same decision.

The oxymoron of staying alive through insanity is not the only thought-provoking element in the novel. Another intriguing line in the plot is the effect the inmates have on their doctors. Some of them hate the patients, some of them even get "infected" by the illnesses they are supposed to cure, while others manage to remain completely empathic and even make the ill happy by their never-ending enthusiasim. This proves what a thin line distinguishes mental health from lunacy, and how people can make others suffer even more just because they are afraid of becoming the same. How people can hurt others just because they remind them of themselves.

Language is not only important because of the Yri language made up by Deborah. It is also relevant because of the different names for insanity. Namely, there is a hierarchy of them: the most severe words, such as sick, crazy and insane can only be used for the patients of D (standing for 'disturbed') ward, whereas the more playful ones, such as cuckoo, nuts, and cracked are used when referred to the inmates of B ward. Some phrases are created by the mentally ill, these are "nutty as a fruitcake" and "bats," shortened from "bats-in-the-belfry." The latest means that "up in your head, where the bells ring, it's night and the bats are flying aroung, black and flapping and random and without direction." It is reassuring to see how even in the darkest places of mind humor and games of language can still work.

The title of the book is uttered by the doctor, Dr. Fried, when Deborah tells her that fighting for sanity might not be worth it at all. After all, "what good is your reality, when justice fails and dishonesty is glossed over and the ones who keep faith suffer." In response, the psychiatrist tells her how reality is imperfect, too, but how boring life would be if we didn't have to struggle for anything, but how you have to put up with the bad side in order to see the beauties of the world.

In the end, Deborah makes up her mind. She is capable of feeling pain again, laughing againg, and she says goodbye to Yr without grudges.

What is your choice?