In laywoman's terms

This is a book about history, not about mental disorders, meaning that the author spends more time talking about how the building was made, the economic struggles the institution faced, the story of some of the most renowned doctors in the staff, all the statistic and percentages you can think of, and so on. There's not much about the interns and their pained narrative, as the title mislead us to believe. Only two stories are in some way explored and one of them is nothing but a few hints to get the reader to buy one of the author's other books.
The text felt disjointed, like they chapters were written as separate articles and then threw together to make a book out of them, ending in a constant repetition of information (and sometimes even identical sentences and quotes) in several sections.
The author takes a lot of pages talking about herself, how she felt about writing this book, about her master and PhD degrees, how much she ascribes to Walter Benjamin when writing (he's the name with more references in the whole book), some writing techniques she prefers for dealing with history subjects. She goes on and on about herself being a historian, a novelist and a poet, yet she's no Élisabeth Roudinesco, not even close.
I was expecting a book about clinical cases, patients' files, diagnosis and treatment used in specific interns. I only got a few pictures without footnotes and self-advertising from the author. I think that, having access to so many files in such a large archive, she could have written a better, more interesting, more human book.