December 18, 1998

The informative article on Dorothea Dix by Janet Eddy Ordway, M.D., in the October 16 issue omitted a vital ingredient of her advocacy. That was her own experience of mental illness, including her recovery process, which may have been aided by her work for others.

According to David Gollaher in the 1995 book Voice for the Mad: The Life of Dorothea Dix, with a background so disturbed that she said she "never knew childhood," she suffered from recurrent severe depressions. Never hospitalized, she dealt with them by temporarily retreating from the world. In 1836-37, recuperating in England from a "nervous breakdown," she met several psychiatric reformers including Samuel Tuke of the York Retreat for mentally ill Quakers, known for its noncoercive approach to psychotic persons. This prepared her to become the "voice for the mad." Her success lay in her passionate "affinity for these beings," seeing "specters of herself in even the most hopeless cases" and delivering her message "with a conviction wrung from personal experience."

Eugene B. Brody, M.D.
Baltimore, Md.