mad love is the intimate true story of a young man who finds love at a mental hospital-& madness in his love of men and women. mad love reveals: Vivid portraits of the people we call patients. A guru psychiatrist whom you both respect and suspect. The mixture of sanity and insanity in each of us. Unique Bluegrass culture & Kentucky history. Our Special Project introduced a radical openness and optimism to a mental hospital. Differences between staff and patients blur; anyone can be therapeutic for anyone. This memoir conveys astonishing friends and magical girlfriends, a journey into the delirious and the erotic. My book brings you INSIDE a mental hospital: to its strangeness, compassion, and unexpected poignancy. I was there-I recorded the details, dialogue, drama. This is your chance to participate. SUMMARY of the STORY Don is a 24-year-old social worker at Eastern State Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. This is the second oldest psychiatric facility in the United States. His supervisor, Brenda, guides him through the mislaid people cast away here. Don befriends these fascinating folk: a winsome girl, Alice; John, once a lawyer, once a pianist, who survives 30 years in the hospital; Kevin, the entertaining preacher no one can capture. Some patients are trouble: huge Hume strangles Don in the nurse's station. Bluesy and others drink illicit alcohol. One midnight, pretty Donna runs out of the hospital... Don coaxes her back. Don grows close to the patients, and learns from everyone. He and Brenda decipher the difference between sick and crazy. A new ward opens, a Special Project. The leader is Dr Stan, a radical psychiatrist who demands everyone be candid. Don joins, but his challenges are a bunch of strange patients, plus unknown staff. One day Don sees a young woman comfort a patient who is suffering a seizure. The woman is Caryn. At the hospital, at a party-at Caryn's mushroom house-they become friends, then lovers. She is Don's next challenge...
