One of those books that will change you, make you feel grateful, fortunate. The Chair and the Valley is a gripping memoir of institutional abuse in a youth psychiatric ward, the wounds it inflicted, and a lifetime of healing them.

After giving away his prized skateboard, 15-year-old Banning Lyon is deemed depressed and suicidal and promptly sent to a psychiatric hospital for “two weeks” that is actually most of a year. The first part of the book details his time here including the physical, mental, and emotional abuse inflicted on the patients; a bleak life of restriction, restraints, and repression. And he may have had one of the easier journeys in the building.

As with any good story based in an “institution,” Lyon introduces us to a rich collection of underdogs and characters along his path — other misfits left to rot in the ward, the tragically beautiful girlfriend, the few adults that step up and step in where others failed. It’s a cast of characters so richly captured and written that you care deeply about what happens to every one — and that can be painful in a book like this one.

The subtitle, A Memoir of Trauma, Healing, and the Outdoors, sets appropriate expectations for the book, which does feel distinctly divided between the Trauma, the Healing, and the Outdoors portions. Those looking for wilderness writing may be a bit disappointed here — the outdoors is more the cherry on top of the author’s healing. Look elsewhere to climb mountains across pages, look here for a deeply human story of rebuilding yourself after life has ground you down.