This was a difficult read. It's disorienting to realise just how unchanging the female experience of mental illness has remained across generations and cultures. While the medical system has thankfully improved, what's heartbreakingly static is a society that still judges and treats female mental illness as a spectacle. plath brilliantly drags you through the three great stages of the deal - denial, despair and finally, the almost comical indifference to your condition. Perhaps the best stream of consciousness work on the descent into depression, which however contains disturbing aspects like racism and homophobia which cannot be dispensed as products of its time.