Only for a Fortnight

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Sue Read was a "difficult" child: strong-minded, strong-willed and given to temper tantrums. Shortly after her father's death, in order to give her mother a much-needed break, a child psychiatrist recommended that Sue should be sent to a mental hospital, but "only for a fortnight". She was 12 years old and remained there for five and a half years.;Much of that time was spent in Ward 19, a locked ward containing the most severely disturbed and violent adult female patients.;"Only For a Fortnight" is Sue Read's own account of her life. It portrays her childhood: her taciturn father; her loving but puzzled mother; her years in mental hospital; her gradual, but eventually total, release from institutional life; her marriage; the births of two children and the traumatic effect that the death of her second child had on her.;Sue Read is now 34 and lives with her husband and children in Stevenage.