Is There No Place on Earth for Me?

"Shortly after midnight on Friday, June 16, 1978, Sylvia Frumkin decided to take a bath. Miss Frumkin, a heavy, ungainly young woman who lived in a two-story yellow brick building in Queens Village, New York, walked from her bedroom on the second floor to the bathroom next door and filled the tub with warm water. A few days earlier, she had had her hair cut and shaped in a bowl style, which she found especially becoming, and her spirits were high. She washed her brown hair with shampoo and also with red mouthwash. Some years earlier, she had tinted her hair red and had liked the way it looked. She had given up wearing her hair red only because she had found coloring it every six weeks too much of a bother. She imagined that the red mouth-wash would somehow be absorbed into her scalp and make her hair red permanently. Miss Frumkin felt so cheerful about her new haircut that she suddenly thought she was Lori Lemaris, the mermaid whom Clark Kent had met in college and had fallen in love with in the old 'Superman' comics. She blew bubbles into the water."

Thus begins Susan Sheehan's vivid portrait of Sylvia Frumkin, a paranoid schizophrenic who has spent much of the last seventeen years in mental institutions. Often Miss Frumkin behaves oddly. She hears strange voices commanding her to do illogical things. She dresses in a bizarre fashion and sees things that aren't there. At her worst, she becomes violent, hostile, and dangerous to herself. At other times, she is lucid, intelligent, and aware. Is There No Place on Earth for Me? chronicles Sylvia Frumkin's passage from an extremely intelligent grade-school student whose IQ was measured at 138 to a confused and lonely adult who has difficulty coping with what she calls "the twilight zone of the real world."

With the scrupulous objectivity that is her hallmark, Susan Sheehan presents Miss Frumkin's life in precise detail. She had access to Sylvia Frumkin's psychiatric records, and did most of her reporting at first hand. She was on the ward taking shorthand notes of Miss Frumkin's monologues and sometimes slept in the bed next to Sylvia Frumkin's when she was hospitalized.

Though in part a searing indictment of our mental institutions, Is There No Place on Earth for Me? is more than that. By providing us with the dramatic and humorous side of Miss Frumkin's life as well as describing the frightening and horrible aspects of her experiences in and out of mental institutions, Susan Sheehan has given us a much greater understanding of the mental patient as an individual. As Robert Coles points out in the Foreword, Mrs. Sheehan's tenacious observations "touch us enough to make us look a little more closely at our own assumptions, our moments of stupidity, insensitivity, and prejudice."