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

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Not a light book, given the topic of women's mental illness and treatment over the past 200 years, yet very interesting indeed. I found Appignanesi's writing style readable and impressively measured, while the content was extremely thought-provoking. I also felt uncomfortable with some aspects of Appignanesi's conclusions (where modern medication and therapies do more to create patients than help them, and in fact women would do better if they were untreated), but can accept that perhaps I'm having difficulty processing this idea objectively.

Focussing on women's mental health and treatment over the last 200 years was an interesting premise and largely successful.The fact that it focuses on women makes it easier for the author to sift through the sheer amount of material that is potentially relevant. I put off reading the book after being lent it on the justified expectation that it would be upsetting in parts, however it was entirely worth persisting with and more accessible than I anticipated. That is not her step brother, that is her half brother, and when discussing molestation it is the difference between violation by a non-blood relative and incest, which makes it an important distinction. Pierwsza połowa książki była nawet w porządku - podróż przez epoki, omawianie konkretnych przypadków (dosyć pobieżne) i co ważniejszych psychiatrów/psychologów/terapeutów, itd. I can only speak of my copy which is from the first run of publication, but there were missing periods in the text, sometimes other missing characters and letters, and all of the references were left with the placeholder of "(see page 000)".

This book might have gotten there, but I couldn't get my brain where it needed to be to really sit down with the material and read. Her own view is eventually revealed - mental illness and depression are far more likely to be caused by poverty than by gender: 'The greatest percentage of both men and women who consult doctors, old age apart, are those who have no regular work or those engaged in manual labour. In my opinion, a diagnosis would have added nothing worthwhile to the description of how she had actually behaved. It looks across two centuries of a growing group of professionals of mind doctors: alienists, psychiatrists, psychologists, psychoanalysts and psychotherapists; neurologists, pathologists, neuroscientists, psychopharmacologists.Of course, libido may be so strong as to become inconvenient (threatening marital stability or leading to charges of rape/harassment) in which case some sort of self-control therapy may be appropriate. 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).

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. Eve was trumped in 1973 by the case of Sybil, who supposedly sported 16 personalities; this was also a best-selling book. For a supposed ‘history’ book there were a lot of times it felt weirdly personal, and there were a few instances of anecdotal ‘facts’ being thrown in with no evidence to back them up. In tracing its histories, this book understands the complex and intractable nature of madness, its often seeming attachment to socially oppressive causes, but just as frequently, its astonishing inexplicability. All in all, this was a decent book, at times the book seemed really long (560 pages) and dry and before i knew it, i read about 10 pages and was thinking about something totally off topic.About twice as many women as men are diagnosed and, if one is to go by the prescription of anti-depressant drugs such as Prozac, rates are soaring. This is the story of how we have understood extreme states of mind over the last two hundred years and how we conceive of them today, from the depression suffered by Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath to the mental anguish and addictions of iconic beauties Zelda Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. Women’s affective states have a long history of being pathologized under names like neurasthenia, hysteria, and schizophrenia. Hmm, this is a patchwork of a book that only follows through on what it promises in the most tangential of fashions. Many psychologists are concerned about the use of diagnostic systems that classify maladaptive behaviours as illnesses when they are better understood as being on a continuum with normality.

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. S. are often contingent on a formal “diagnosis” and, once a “disease” has been identified, drugs and surgical procedures are produced to address it.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.