"I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can," which became a best seller, detailed her years of prescription drug abuse and offered an indictment of American psychiatry.
Barbara Gordon, whose scorching 1979 memoir of prescription pill abuse and a mental breakdown that undid her successful TV producing career, "I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can," became a movie starring Jill Clayburgh, died on April 7 at her home in Manhattan. She was 90.
She died in hospice care after several years of declining health, her brother, Edward Loeb, said.
Ms. Gordon's book found a wide audience in an era when prescription drug abuse was far less well known than it is today, when checking into "rehab" to kick an addiction was not nearly so commonplace, and when mental illness carried a far greater stigma in work and social life.
In 1975, when she was 40, Ms. Gordon was an Emmy Award-winning documentary writer and director at WCBS, CBS's flagship station in New York. She had a rent-controlled apartment on Central Park West, a live-in partner and an addiction to 30 milligrams a day of Valium, which a psychiatrist had prescribed for her anxiety.
When she told her doctor that she wanted to stop the pills, he assured her they were not addictive and instructed her to quit "absolutely cold." Instead of easing off the medication, Ms. Gordon spiraled quickly downward to the edge of psychosis. Unable to work, she spent months in two mental hospitals.
She began writing her memoir in 1977, soon after leaving the second hospital, when WCBS made no move to bring her back on. She sent out resumes to other stations but received no offers.
"Maybe it was stigma, maybe it was timing," she wrote, "but I couldn't find a job in the business I had worked in for 20 years."
The book's harrowing account of recovery from addiction also included an intimate glimpse at the anxieties that had led Ms. Gordon to seek the narcotizing damper of Valium in the first place.
"One sees that the book is a genuine offering," the author Jill Robinson wrote in The New York Times Book Review. "It hides nothing, yet is not exploitive."
Ms. Gordon's memoir also offered an indictment of American psychiatry. She sought the help of some 20 psychiatrists, mostly men, with impressive certificates on their walls but dogmatic, often sexist views of the human psyche. She was variously diagnosed (or misdiagnosed) as schizophrenic, manic-depressive, agitated depressive, hysterical and neurotic.
She described herself as "a victim of the individual and collective ignorance of a profession that, because it is essentially unmonitored, attracts into its ranks a brand of charlatan that wouldn't dare practice in other branches of the medical establishment."
Harper & Row, Ms. Gordon's hardcover publisher, had minimal expectations for the book, paying Ms. Gordon a modest $7,500 advance. Sales and interest quickly accelerated, though. Paramount paid $200,000 for the film rights, and Bantam bought the paperback rights for close to $500,000. "I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can" eventually sold more than two million copies, according to its publishers.
The movie version, released in 1982, was directed by Jack Hofsiss and starred Ms. Clayburgh, who was known for her repertoire of frazzled '70s career women. It received mixed reviews.
Barbara Sue Loeb was born on Dec. 19, 1935, in Miami Beach, the older of two children of Lewis and Sally (Kurman) Loeb. Her father owned a pharmacy and then a prosperous restaurant supply business.
Barbara graduated from Miami Beach High School and left for Vassar College in 1953, which she attended for two years before transferring to Barnard College in New York. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in government in 1957.
Eager to break into television, she took a course in speed writing to qualify for the only job available, as a secretary at NBC. Her talent offered her opportunities to advance to researcher, associate producer and then a writer-producer of documentaries.
She remained at NBC until the late 1960s. She then went to National Educational Television, a predecessor of the Public Broadcasting Service, where she worked on a documentary about the Federal Bureau of Investigation targeting left-wing groups during the Nixon era. She was subsequently hired by WCBS, where her work won a pair of Emmys.
At the same time, she experienced panic attacks in public places. She believed Valium helped manage her symptoms, but the attacks kept occurring.
Even though Ms. Gordon had made a documentary about the abuses of psychiatry, she was unable to recognize that the aloof "Dr. Allen" -- her doctor's pseudonym in the memoir -- was doing her little good.
When she told him she wanted to get off Valium, he made no mention, in her account, that withdrawal had to be managed with tapering doses. Instead, he offered her an antipsychotic drug: "Perhaps you'd like to try a little Stelazine?"
Once Ms. Gordon quit cold turkey, she could not sleep or go to work. She descended into crying fits. Her live-in boyfriend, she wrote, started to beat her and tried to imprison her in the apartment.
She landed in a mental hospital on Long Island, where a doctor prescribed more pills and sent her home before she was stable.
"I had come apart in a thousand pieces and I still wasn't whole," she wrote.
A new psychiatrist in Manhattan diagnosed schizophrenia and tried to put her on the powerful drug Thorazine. Ms. Gordon resisted, and ended up in the second mental hospital, this one in Connecticut.
There, she found an empathetic young female psychologist who disavowed drugs and instead wanted to dig deeply into Ms. Gordon’s family life and bad relationships with men.
Ms. Gordon wrote two other books, the novel "Defects of the Heart" (1983) and "Jennifer Fever" (1988), a work of pop sociology about older men in relationships with younger women. Neither was embraced by reviewers or readers.
Her marriage in 1961 to Myron Gordon, a college professor, ended several years later in divorce. Her brother is her only immediate survivor.
In her memoir, Ms. Gordon called her female therapist "Julie," and reported on their sessions in detail.
"I have a haunting, almost obsessive picture in my head, Julie," she recounted saying in one session. "Thousands of women all across the country being given pills by male doctors. Men sedating women; tranquilizing them; helping to rob them of themselves. It's obscene."