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

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ABSTRACT This important essay looks at white female mental health in the British Raj in the second half of the nineteenth century. Given how the mental health of trans people is treated in a very particular way, this seems like a fruitful direction for a book that seeks to challenge the social and political constructs around femaleness and mental illness. In 2004, she became Deputy President of English PEN and has run its highly successful 'Free Expression is No Offence Campaign' against the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. After she had a miscarriage, she became plagued by memories of her childhood and voices started to speak to her, castigating her for the 'dirty' fantasies in her memory. Diagnosis, treatment, and illnesses themselves are intimately bound up with discourses of gender, race, class, and the body.

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.The one message that is threaded through the book is the extent to which 'madness' is culturally defined and historicised (as are most other ideas): 'not conforming to a norm risks the label of deviance or madness, and is sometimes attended by confinement' (p. Or are there life events unique to the female experience that make women more susceptible to mental health problems?

Regarding CBT, I think the impact of the therapist being a sympathetic person who wants to understand the nature of the problem and help may be underestimated.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.

Not all of these will make the final list but the more diagnostic categories there are, the more business there is for therapists and the more potential profit for drug companies. The existence of functioning, successful psychopaths further confirmed by the fact that many dictators would fit the diagnostic criteria of anti-social, narcissistic, paranoid and sadistic PD (Fallon, 2011). g., motorists who have fallen asleep at the wheel) while giving bail to others from whom the public deserves protection (e.It has been suggested that positive experiences such as a happy childhood divert them from a life of crime, but high IQ might be their real salvation. But Appignanesi’s ethical compass often veers well off-course, her tone slipping into flippancy at some of the most painful (for the Mad) moments.