Mad, Bad And Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present

Product Information

Brandon was brought up by a brutal aunt who subjected her to beatings from the age of three: these began to form the basis for her childhood fantasies. However, there is increasing concern about the progressive medicalising of eccentricity and bad behaviour (Wakefield, 2011). There have always been more female mental patients than male, and they have been treated differently most of the time.

I really, really did, as there's a wonderful amount of information in hear about the history of the psychiatric profession in general, along with numerous case studies of how the mental health field has been applied to women though the past several centuries. There were sections in this book I found very interesting; some of the stories of patients or "mind doctors" were very interesting to read and compare how things have changed over time. As philosopher Ian Hacking puts it: 'In every generation, there are quite firm rules on how to behave when you are crazy. The subject is interesting, and the post-Freud chapters were especially fascinating, but the book was poorly executed. As a soon-to-be pharmacist and longtime sufferer of mental illness myself, I know Big Pharma is evil.

Of course, libido may be so strong as to become inconvenient (threatening marital stability or leading to charges of rape/harassment) in which case some sort of self-control therapy may be appropriate. I would have liked to go into the minds of the women receiving treatment, and get some sense of what happened to them. I admit this one is a bit petty of an observation all things considered, but at one point she is talking about one of the women being molested as a child, and refers to the perpetrator as being her step brother, but then goes on to state it was her mother's child from a first marriage. If we insist on prolonging our lives with education and modern medicine, shouldn't we also look at the equally, if not more important, means to create meaning and quality as well?

Alice Anderson, Louise Bourgeois, Helen Chadwick, Tracey Emin, Elliott Erwitt, Jane Fradgley, Anna Furse, Isa Genzken, Susan Hiller, Joanna Kane, Sarah Lucas, Lydia Lys, Amie Siegel and Francis Upritchard, plus Richard Dadd and Salvador Dali.

The materials drawn upon include medical text books, contemporary periodicals, literary and non-literary printed books of British India, Annual Reports of lunatic asylums, medical certificates, and Certificates of admission. Likewise, who can say they are safe from the factors he considers predictive of mental alienation: irregularities in the environment; sudden, oppressive or excessive passions; a melancholic constitution? It was a wise choice, I think, to centre the book both on female sufferers of mental illness and those who have sought to treat them. In the 1960s to 1980s vast numbers of tranquillizers like Valium were prescribed for women’s “anxiety”. Madness', the book claims, is often as much a function of power hierarchies and capitalist interests (the diet industry, Big Pharma, the role of everyday therapy and the self-help industry) as it may be of mental health.

The theory of menstrual madness held a tight grip on the understanding of even the most prominent of nineteenth-century physicians. it's one of those places where there is no end note giving a source that is most sorely needed when providing those kind of statistics. Part of the problem is that Appignanesi is trying very hard to shoe-horn in many related but separate issues into a single linear history: the development of psychiatry; the changing constructions and representations of gender, especially femininity; and mini biographies of all kinds of people from women labelled as 'mad, bad or sad' (e. But as a perceived objective reporter, she has no business throwing in opinions at the end of paragraphs of history and assumed fact.The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. Or would she have thought that perhaps the world itself had gone a little mad in trying to classify every fear/disappointment/hurt feeling as a symptom of a wider illness.

They are also reminiscent of the three major personality types identified by Eysenck using factor analysis (Psychoticism, Extraversion and Neuroticism). Not a light book, given the topic of women's mental illness and treatment over the past 200 years, yet very interesting indeed. Pierwsza połowa książki była nawet w porządku - podróż przez epoki, omawianie konkretnych przypadków (dosyć pobieżne) i co ważniejszych psychiatrów/psychologów/terapeutów, itd. ABSTRACT This important essay looks at white female mental health in the British Raj in the second half of the nineteenth century.A TV channel is devoted almost entirely to his pronouncements and tickets for his 2012 Wembley Stadium appearance are selling like hot cakes. I was looking for information on how the mental health profession has developed and the role women patients played in it.