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

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They point out that the categories are unreliable in that clinicians fail to agree on which labels to apply to a client and there is a risk of using them to stigmatise people (BPS, 2011). The author intersperses the history of the treatment of mental illness with biographies of both famous patients and therapists, along with some chapters that focus ‘trends’ in mental illness. This book is not really about women with mental illness, as you would assume based on the fact that is what it purports itself to be. V. (2007) Transforming normality into pathology: The DSM and the outcomes of stressful social arrangements. This fascinating history of mind doctors and their patients probes the ways in which madness, badness, and sadness have been understood over the last two centuries.

Treatments are available for psychopathy but, in any case, it should not matter too much because the real issue is one ofdangerousness. Here too is the story of how over the years symptoms and diagnoses have developed together to create fashions in illness and how treatments have succeeded or sometimes failed. Philipe Pinel, Jean Etienne Esquirol, Jean Martin Charcot, Alexander Morison, William James, Havelock Ellis, Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud, Lou Andreas Salome, Sandor Ferenczi, Hanns Sachs, Princess Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingham, Melanie Klein, Ruth Beuscher and Marianne Kris. Less of an objective historical look on the treatment of women re: mental illness and more of a rambling set of descriptions about various (mostly male) mind doctors with a noted lack of attempt to try and explain terms in a layman’s fashion. The theory of menstrual madness held a tight grip on the understanding of even the most prominent of nineteenth-century physicians.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. From the depression suffered by Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath to the mental anguish and addictions of iconic beauties Zelda Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe.

What was affectionately known as "shell shock" is now a recognized disease resulting from horrendous trauma. 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? She seems to be of the impression that child abuse - both physical and sexual - are a 'class' issue, aka a poor person's issue, which is absurd. This was part of the extraordinary case of Henriette Cornier, a nursemaid who calmly sliced off the head of her 19-month-old charge and threw it out of the window because 'the idea presented itself'. My only moments of confusion came with her odd comma placement, and too many phrases contained within one sentence.The use of famous women’s lives and writings, such as Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and Marilyn Monroe work as case studies of both depth and breadth. This is described as extreme black and white thinking, instability in mood and relationships, self-image and identity problems and inclinations toward impulsivity and self-harm. Her reading of 'the most iconic mind doctor' is generous, although she examines in detail why Freud has been portrayed as sexist. It both affirms common perceptions of the field and surprises; taking mental illness out of hospitals, off couches, and into our everyday lives – from popular malaise to the lithium in 7-Up. I felt the book suffered from the great weight of knowledge that it tried to contain and would have benefitted from frankly being a bit shorter.

Elżbieta Borensztejn was born on 4 January 1946 in Łódź, Poland, the daughter of Hena and Aaron Borensztejn with Jewish origin. Breast-feeding women were seen as having 'lactational insanity' (it was thought, quite literally, that they had milk on the brain). However, one gets the sense that the loose focus on women came only after the book was written, more as a suggestion from her editor to pare the tome down, rather than being the author's incipient specialization. I do know that Kurt Cobain was not a cutter or known for self-harm of that manner, and the fact that she would include what is supposed to be an actual quote in the text and never bother to double check the veracity - or even just the exact wording - of it at all just blew my mind. However, there is increasing concern about the progressive medicalising of eccentricity and bad behaviour (Wakefield, 2011).As a soon-to-be pharmacist and longtime sufferer of mental illness myself, I know Big Pharma is evil. It is a fairly unchallenging book, easy to read and understand, even though going through 500 pages was tough and my slow progression through it almost drove me mad, bad and sad (eheh, can't avoid inserting a pun). There is a growing tendency to medicalise behaviours that are just distressing or upsetting, perhaps encouraged by medical insurance and drug companies.