This book...is a work of fiction. None of the characters, including Istina Movet, portrays a living person." The disclaimer to Janet Frame's second novel, "Faces in the Water", published in 1961, fooled no one. Istina Movet was herself in the thinnest disguise, enduring the full barbarities of the treatment of mental illness in New Zealand in the mid-20th century. Miss Frame was first institutionalised in 1945, when she was 21. The doctors diagnosed incipient schizophrenia. As she explained it, a great gap had opened up between herself and the world, "drifting away through a violet-coloured sea where hammer-nosed sharks in tropical ease swam side by side with the seals and the polar bears." No comforting god appeared to remove "the foreign ideas, the glass beads of fantasy, the bent hair-pins of unreason" embedded in her mind. She needed "treatment"-electro-convulsive therapy at the Seacliff hospital in Dunedin.
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