"The Snake Pit" by Mary Jane Ward

A dramatic best-seller, The Snake Pit vividly depicts one woman's plunge into the nightmare world of the mentally ill and her agonizing climb back to health and freedom. When it was first published, the book claimed attention as a moving study of mental illness based on personal knowledge. This fictionalized, brilliant, and uncompromising first-person account of madness and life in an insane asylum was subsequently made into a haunting film, a psychological drama directed by Anatole Litvak and starring Olivia de Havilland, Mark Stevens, Leo Genn, and Celeste Holm.