Voices in the Storm: A Personal Journey of Recovery From Mental Illness • Body Scripture: A Therapist's Journal of Recovery From Multiple Personality • Katie.com: My Story

Sexual abuse is a central theme in the three books reviewed here. J. Alyson Hastings, author of Voices in the Storm, and Barbara Hope, author of Body Scripture, are women in midlife reflecting back on how sexual abuse affected their lives. Katherine Tarbox, in Katie.com, is a teenager writing about a new, contemporary form of sexual abuse, online pseudosexual encounters and their potential consequences.

Voices in the Storm is the autobiography of a first-generation American of German extract, who was born in 1958 and was diagnosed as having schizophrenia at age 18. Her mother died when she was quite young, and she went to live with her cousin and the cousin's husband. By the time she was four years old, she was regularly the victim of physical and emotional abuse by the cousin, and shortly thereafter, of sexual abuse by the cousin's husband. She was pregnant by him at age ten. As the result of a later pregnancy, she became a single mother, and at age 34 she received a diagnosis of multiple personality disorder. Her struggles with her mental illness are successful enough that she was able to obtain a position as a case manager.

The book has powerful passages describing physical and sexual abuse, accounts of the demeaning misrepresentation of the abilities of persons with serious mental illness, frightening descriptions of self-injury, and reports of mental health treatment that raise issues of boundary violations.

The book is off-putting because of the author's use of the first-person plural "we." Also, the account is not always accurate, such as when the author reports that she was treated with "an injection of mellaril." The book is virtually devoid of any descriptions of what it is like to be a single parent while struggling with active symptoms of mental illness.

The book is really a story of empowerment, however. The author notes, "There are still so many people with this terrible disability of mental illness thinking that they won't have any life to speak of. It's just not true." Her mission appears to be to elaborate on this statement.

Voices in the Storm is best read by individuals struggling with severe mental illnesses who have questions about the costs of and possibilities for recovery. As Hastings puts it, "While sometimes it was a lucky thing to be able to 'pass' in the everyday world and make it through the routine of life, mostly it left me feeling isolated and lonely. It was terrible in some ways, to feel so horribly sad, so full of despair, so hopeless, so tormented, that I wanted to die, and made an attempt to do so, but to also feel like I had an obligation to act as if everything was ok. To smile and say, I'm fine, thanks, and you?"

Body Scripture is a book about recovery from multiple personality disorder. Barbara Hope, now 60, grew up in Boston, the daughter of a waitress and a short-order cook. She was in a convent between the ages of 17 and 20. She was married between the ages of 23 and 35. While married she had six pregnancies, which produced four children; another child died in infancy, and one pregnancy ended in miscarriage.

Ms. Hope's history includes significant sexual abuse. She was raped by her father, sexually abused by a friend of her father's and by a priest, sexually seduced by a female therapist at age 37, and physically abused by her husband. Even earlier in life she was sexually abused by the male member of a couple with whom she and her sister spent summer months.

The book's narrative actually begins in the winter of 1998, and all we learn about the author's history is through her contemporary therapy. The book raises a multitude of issues concerning boundaries and boundary violations. In her relationships with therapists, her role has ranged from a strict patient role through friendship and, in one instance, sexual seduction by a female therapist.

Some of the exchanges reported between therapist and patient become cliché or insipid. For example, therapist Sally says to patient Barbara Hope, "Abandonment is the deepest pain. Facing the hole within yourself is healing."

Ms. Hope accounts for 30 to 40 alters, a group she often refers to as "our inner team." Nonetheless, she reports being given a diagnosis of schizophrenia. She attempts to reconcile her diagnoses near the end of the book as follows: "I thought about that gray area where schizophrenia and dissociation overlapped. When trauma overwhelmed the dissociative defenses, my mind was hurt and I developed a thought disorder. I feared the broken place in me where my mind was lost."

The main problem with Body Scripture is that Ms. Hope drowns the reader in wave after wave of alters. This account of an individual dealing with the treatment for multiple personality disorder is much less successful than those previously reviewed in this journal, such as Broken Child by Marcia Cameron and The Magic Daughter by Jane Phillips (1).

Katie.com recounts a modern story of sexual abuse. In June 1995 Katherine Tarbox, a 13-year-old student in New Canaan, Connecticut, began using America Online. A somewhat overweight young teen, Ms. Tarbox felt that she didn't entirely fit in with her well-to-do, stylish, upper-middle-class peers in New Canaan and sought male contact through the Internet. In a teen chat room in September 1995, Ms. Tarbox "met" an individual claiming to be a young man named Mark whose interests paralleled hers.

Through continued AOL contacts, their relationship progressed until they met on March 12, 1996, in Texas; she was there to take part in a high school swim meet, and he was there specifically to meet her. At that point Ms. Tarbox learned that Mark was not at all who he presented himself to be, but rather a 41-year-old man named Francis John Kufrovich. When they met, Mr. Kufrovich attempted to sexually molest her. She decided to press charges, and the case proceeded through state and federal courts over the next two years, culminating in Mr. Kufrovich's being sentenced to 18 months in jail.

The first half of Katie.com is written very much as a young adolescent girl might write. The second half of this first-person account is qualitatively different. Either Ms. Tarbox matured considerably as a result of her experiences, or her editor became much more involved, or her editor decided a change in tone and style for the latter part of the book was appropriate.

Beyond the pitfalls of online pseudosexual encounters, Katie.com provides a telling account of a teenage girl's struggle to make use of individual psychotherapy. Ms. Tarbox writes, "I never did understand therapy, but I went because my mother and [her husband] David insisted. And so, in addition to being a slut and a victim, I became a mental patient. The psychologist offered absolutely no direction to any of her conversations. I would talk for about twenty minutes straight and then she would say, 'Yes, and how do you feel about that?'"

It is not clear what Katie.com offers an audience now, when the information Ms. Tarbox provides is much better known than it was during her experiences between 1995 and 1998. The book may be of use to young women, but many of them have probably been informed, if not warned, about what Ms. Tarbox and her family were naive to five years ago.

Ms. Tarbox has written a first-person account that may well have helped her heal. Its value to others is less clear.