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

Abstract

Extreme states of mind, uncontrollable emotions, thinking that is oblivious to the real--have all long been part of the human condition. How is it that over the last two hundred years they have increasingly become suitable states for treatment by a retinue of professionals from psychiatrists to pharmacologists to a wide assortment of therapists? And is it the case that women suffer disproportionately from such ills? In this fascinating history of mind doctors and their patients, of diagnoses and symptoms, acclaimed writer Lisa Appignanesi probes the ways in which madness, badness, and sadness have been understood over the last two centuries and into our own by philosophers, psychological thinkers, writers, and patients themselves. She charts a story from the days when the mad were considered either possessed or akin to dangerous, raving animals or simply "peculiar" to our own twenty-first century when the psychiatric manual, the DSM, lists some 350 mental disorders, each with their recommended treatments. She asks whether the colonization of our inner life, our ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving by mind professionals and Big Pharma has now gone too far. The benefits of the long-span view are many and intriguing. Appignanesi shows how each historical moment has its own specific rules for being crazy. Monomania emerged from the excesses of the French revolutionary period, nervous illness from the speed and duties of the Victorian era. The mind doctors' focus on hysteria and then on sleep, sex, and dreams came at a time of radical change, particularly for women. Depression and eating disorders shadow our own epoch of plenty. Diagnoses also come with a myriad of treatments--galvanic, electrical, surgical, sexual, chemical, or talking. Respite from the family whether in an asylum or sanatorium could be key, or alternately care by a loved one was part of the treatment itself. Today, the lucrative search for magic bullet miracle cures may produce as much illness as it treats. From the depression suffered by Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath to the mental anguish and addictions of iconic beauties Zelda Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. From Théroigne de Méricourt, the Fury of the Gironde, who descended from the bloody triumphs of the French Revolution to untamable insanity in La Salpetrière asylum, to Mary Lamb, sister of Charles, who in the throes of a breakdown turned on her mother with a kitchen knife. From Freud and Jung and the radical breakthroughs of psychoanalysis to Lacan's construction of a modern movement and the new women-centered therapies, Appignanesi probes the writings and life stories of both analysts and patients. Women play a key role here, both as talented patients who furthered the understanding of the mind and eventually as medics and therapists themselves. Controversially, Appignanesi argues that they have significantly changed the nature of mind-doctoring, but in the process they may also have inadvertently highlighted new patterns of illness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)(jacket)