Much Madness is Divinest Sense

Much Madness is Divinest Sense
Author: Kathleen J. Greider
Publisher:
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2007
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780829815702

Greider believes that those who produce accounts of their struggle with "madness" or mental illness--whether in themselves or someone they love--assert that there is sometimes "divinest sense" in madness, and that divinest sense is something of ultimate value.

The Suffering of Women Who Didn't Fit

The Suffering of Women Who Didn't Fit
Author: David J. Vaughan
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2018-11-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1526732300

For over 500 years, women have suffered claims of mental decay solely on account of their gender. Frigid, insane, not quite there, a witch in sheep's clothing, labels that have cast her as the fragile species and destroyer of Man.This book reveals attitudes, ideas and responses on what was to be done with 'mad women' in Britain.Journey back into the unenlightened Middle Ages to find demonic possession, turbulent humours and the wandering womb. In the Puritan Age, when the mad were called witches and scolds ducked for their nagging. The age of Austen and a sense and sensibility created from her fragile nerves. Then descend into Victorian horrors of wrongful confinement and merciless surgeons, before arriving, just half a century past, to the Viennese couch and an obligation to talk.At the heart of her suffering lay her gynaecological make-up, driving her mad every month and at every stage of her life. Terms such as menstrual madness, puerperal insanity and 'Old Maid's Insanity' poison history's pages.An inescapable truth is now shared: that so much, if not all, was a male creation. Though not every medic was male, nor every male a fiend, misogynist thought shaped our understanding of women, set down expectations and 'corrected' the flawed.The book exposes the agonies of life for the 'second class' gender; from misdiagnosis to brutal oppression, seen as in league with the Devil or the volatile wretch. Touching no less than six centuries, it recalls how, for a woman, being labelled as mad was much less a risk, more her inevitable burden.

Suffering Insanity

Suffering Insanity
Author: R. D. Hinshelwood
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2004
Genre: Caregivers
ISBN: 9781583918937

When madness is intolerable for sufferers, how do professional carers remain sane? Psychiatric institutions have always been places of fear and awe. Madness impacts on family, friends and relatives, but also those who provide a caring environment, whether in large institutions of the past, or community care in the present. This book explores the effects of the psychotic patient's suffering on carers and the culture of psychiatric services. Suffering Insanity is arranged as three essays. The first concerns staff stress in psychiatric services, exploring how the impact of madness demands a personal resilience as well as careful professional support, which may not be forthcoming. The second essay attempts a systematic review of the nature of psychosis and the intolerable psychotic experience, which the patient attempts to evade, and which the carer must confront in the course of daily work. The third essay returns to the impact of psychosis on the psychiatric services, which frequently configure in ways which can have serious and harmful effects on the provision of care. In particular, service may succumb to an unfortunate schismatic process resulting in sterile conflict, and to an assertively scientific culture, which leads to an unwitting depersonalisation of patients. Suffering Insanity makes a powerful argument for considering care in the psychiatric services as a whole system that includes staff as well as patients; all need attention and understanding in order to deliver care in as humane a way as possible. All those working in the psychiatric services, both in large and small agencies and institutions, will appreciate that closer examination of the actual psychology and interrelations of staff, as well as patients, is essential and urgent.

On Madness

On Madness
Author: Richard G. T. Gipps
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2022-09-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350192570

Can we reach the psychotic subject in their delusion? Psychopathological theorists often try to find a way to characterise this subject's inner predicament so that their opaque utterances and actions will now rationally hang together. In this pathbreaking work, philosopher and clinical psychologist Richard G. T. Gipps demonstrates how such efforts at rational retrieval actually result in us setting our face against the psychotic subject in their distress. Bringing together patient memoir, psychopathological observation and philosophical thought, Gipps offers a profound alternative. On the one hand he shows how, by appreciating just why we can't locate rational order within psychotic thought, we can better understand what it is to suffer delusion and psychosis. On the other, he recovers for us the value of such expressive, motivational and symbolic forms of understanding as only become available once we've been turned away at reason's door. In such ways Gipps not only solves the psychopathological problem of delusion, but also shows us how to bear a truer witness to the psychotic subject in their brokenness, pain and despair.

Writing Madness, Writing Normalcy

Writing Madness, Writing Normalcy
Author: Lisa Spieker
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2021-05-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1476682275

What does it mean to be "mad" in contemporary American society? How do we categorize people's reactions to extreme pressures, trauma, loneliness and serious mental illness? Importantly--who gets to determine these classifications, and why? This book seeks to answer these questions through studying an increasingly popular media genre--memoirs of people with mental illnesses. Memoirs, like the ones examined in this book, often respond to stigmatizing tropes about "the mad" in popular culture and engage with concepts in mental health activism and research. This study breaks new academic ground and argues that the featured texts rethink the possibilities of community building and stigma politics. Drawing on literary analysis and sociological concepts, it understands these memoirs as complex, at times even contradictory, approaches to activism.

Defining Madness

Defining Madness
Author: Peter Barry Shea
Publisher: Hawkins Press
Total Pages: 172
Release: 1999
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9781876067120

". . . Dr Shea's fascinating history and analysis of mental health law in New South Wales from its earliest days ... a lucid and scholarly account of the medico-legal concept of mental illness. Members of both professions and many others besides will profit from his research and have a much clearer understanding of the importance of the policy issues involved and the inherent difficulty of attempting to solve them in the words of a statute. ... Far from being a dry legislative history, this is an absorbing account of the attempt to set out the circumstances that would justify a person being involuntarily detained in a mental hospital."Michael Sexton SC, Solicitor-General for NSW Dr Shea focuses on the central point of tension in mental health legislation - the need to balance an individual's right, in normal circumstances, to liberty and privacy, with the need to protect the general community including members of the individual's family. In Australia that debate has been conducted largely through the definition of a "mentally ill person". A person admitted as "a mentally ill person" can be confined for the length of their treatment; the definition, accordingly, raises a special need for a system of safeguards. Dr Shea charts the changes to the definition from Lunacy Act 1843 to the 1997 amendments to the Mental Health Act 1990. He discusses not only the various statutory provisions but also the numerous committee reports and parliamentary debates in which the issue is explored.

Encountering Crises of the Mind

Encountering Crises of the Mind
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2018-09-24
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9004308539

Mental health and madness have been challenging topics for historians. The field has been marked by tension between the study of power, expertise and institutional control of insanity, and the study of patient experiences. This collection contributes to the ongoing discussion on how historians encounter mental ‘crises’. It deals with diagnoses, treatments, experiences and institutions largely outside the mainstream historiography of madness – in what might be described as its peripheries and borderlands (from medieval Europe to Cold War Hungary, from the Atlantic slave coasts to Indian princely states, and to the Nordic countries). The chapters highlight many contests and multiple stakeholders involved in dealing with mental suffering, and the importance of religion, lay perceptions and emotions in crises of mind. Contributors are Jari Eilola, Waltraud Ernst, Anssi Halmesvirta, Markku Hokkanen, Kalle Kananoja, Tuomas Laine-Frigrén, Susanna Niiranen, Anu Rissanen, Kirsi Tuohela, and Jesper Vaczy Kragh.

Women and the Psychosocial Construction of Madness

Women and the Psychosocial Construction of Madness
Author: Marie Brown
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2019-08-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1498591957

Women and the Psychosocial Construction of Madness focuses on the question of madness as it is experienced by women within gendered sociopolitical contexts. Contributors to this edited collection engage with a diverse range of topics, including black and ethnic minority women’s experiences of psychosis, psychosis in transwomen, sexual trauma and psychosis, the doctor–patient relationship, and women’s experiences of mental health treatment and recovery. Chapters span the disciplines of psychoanalysis, sociology, women’s studies, critical theory, and madness studies.

Women, Madness and the Law

Women, Madness and the Law
Author: Wendy Chan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2012-10-12
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1135311161

This book explores, for the first time in an edited collection, the intersection of three key research areas - women, madness and the law - and advances the debates on how law and the 'psy' sciences play a critical role in regulating and controlling women's lives.