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

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I admire Appignanesi for taking on the ambitious and daunting task of writing Mad, Bad and Sad – no surprise that it was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non Fiction in 2008. Taking responsibility for your own health and wellness means every part, not just numbers that come from blood tests.

Ott, a physician with a nearly twenty-year practice, to the Wisconsin State Hospital for the Insane.Ostatnie dwa rozdziały to jakiś dziwny rant autorki, akapity posklejane niczym praca zaliczeniowa na studiach.

People and their illnesses don't fit neatly into boxes, but without some stratification and classification, we put everyone in one giant box, understanding and helping no one. Women play a key role here, both as patients - among them Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Marilyn Monroe - and as therapists. When homosexuality was illegal in the UK it was regarded as an illness, with its own numerical code. The thread running through this work is that all women - and all men - are mad, bad and sad at times, and that we must be wary of classifying those who seem excessively so, because, in labelling them, we are simply labelling the human condition.By diagnosing Ott with mania, state hospital physicians created and reinforced geographical boundaries on her daily activities, lessened her already limited legal rights, restricted her future, and rewrote her past. Of course, self-report questionnaires are fakeable so in some circumstances we need to look towards brain-based assessments that cannot be manipulated. A TV channel is devoted almost entirely to his pronouncements and tickets for his 2012 Wembley Stadium appearance are selling like hot cakes. In fact, she did exhibit many erratic and theatrical behaviours that could be described as histrionic. I really enjoyed the historical examples of the treatment of women with mental health problems, and the clear way Appignanesi breaks down theories and treatments.

She uses all the correct terminology but does not get buried in jargon and medical language, so you need not worry about getting lost or confused. William Rowley, professor of medicine at Oxford University and member of the Royal College of Physicians, eagerly wrote of the 'passio hysterica' repressed menstruation, or amenorrhea, could bring about in women in 1800: 'The tongue falters, trembles, and incoherent things are spoken; the voice changes; some roar, scream or shriek immoderately; others sigh deeply, weep or moan plaintively'. This paper will focus on representations of mad women, such as Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre, as well as the violent murderesses of Victorian sensation and crime fiction and show how their 'madness' is linked to sociological constructs of the body and in particular, to menstruation. Appignanesi offers a detailed and critical review of the last two centuries of "mind-doctoring", from alienism to physiognomy to psychoanalysis to psychiatry.I cut myself to get the pain out,' Kurt Cobain, lead singer of the grunge band Nirvana, famously said before committing suicide. ONLY HE NEVER SAID SUCH A THING, not even close or paraphrased, not at all, never mind having said it 'famously' before he committed suicide. g. Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Marilyn Monroe) to doctors and psychiatrists from the little-known to the canonical such as Freud and Lacan.