The Common Loon

Synopsis

The Common Loon

Rachel Corday


What is life like inside the mental institution? This
is a question we have rarely asked and even less often
wanted an answer to. The prospect, we feel, is too
horrifying, too bleak.
But life in the institution is much more than the sum
of our illusions about it. For people on the inside,
they are living a life. How can one live a life inside
the institution? we ask. Surely there is only
wretchedness; pathetic individuals who have fallen
outside of time and lost a sense of existence in the
world.
In The Common Loon, a woman named Cooper shows us the
reality of patient life on the inside. She shows that
mental patients have unique and creative perspectives,
character and integrity like anyone else, and humility
wrought from suffering, the kind of which is not seen
except here, where people are severely and chronically
ill and separated from their freedom and from anyone
who might care.
The Common Loon is based on my life, a life of forty
years having been in mental institutions from
Portland, Oregon, to Honolulu, to San Francisco, to
L.A., to Denver, to New York, to London. It is the
story of the sadness and beauty and humor of so many
lives that I have had the good fortune and honor to be
able to know.