I’m knee-deep in writing my memoir. I have 350 pages of the first draft written and I haven’t even begun the narrative of my work with my former psychiatrist, Dr. Lev. That’s an additional 11 years of therapy. My writing instructor says the first draft is basically “word vomit,” and then you go back and edit, edit, edit. As the saying goes, every writer needs to “kill her darlings.”

In preparation for writing about that time with Dr. Lev, whom I first saw in September 2005 and then was hospitalized six times in the subsequent 18 months for intense suicidality , I obtained my hospital records for those admissions — just the admission notes, but those were revealing enough.

Copies of records have always been available to clients by law but obtaining them has been a cumbersome process to

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