Defining Madness
Defining Madness

Author: Peter Barry Shea

Publisher: Hawkins Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 9781876067120

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". . . 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.

The Insanity of Madness
The Insanity of Madness

Author: Dr Daniel R Berger II

Publisher:

Published: 2018-02-03

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 9780997607758

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For much of the twentieth century, psychiatry, psychology and social theory have held that mental illness, historically known as madness, cannot be objectively defined. This fluidity of concept is especially striking in light of the dogmatism that continues to characterize these fields of study and practice. However, the unmistakable failure to effectively treat the widespread evidence of mental struggle points to the possibility that psychiatric theory has gotten something wrong or missed something at the foundational level. Could it be that mental illness is recognizable across all cultures and all eras, that it has a clear definition which was directly stated in the past and still is implied in modern psychiatry through the DSM-5? This book explores what mental illness or madness is; furthermore, it asserts that mental illness does indeed have a clear definition, a distinct cause and a reliable remedy. No one will argue that fact that the diagnoses of mental illness are of epidemic proportions. But this does not have to be the case: the remedy is clear; the madness can stop.

Madness in Civilization
Madness in Civilization

Author: Andrew Scull

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-04-06

Total Pages: 12

ISBN-13: 0691166153

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Originally published: London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2015.

The Meaning of Madness
The Meaning of Madness

Author: Neel L. Burton

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13:

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This book proposes to open up the debate on mental disorders, to get people interested and talking, and to get them thinking. For example, what is schizophrenia? Why is it so common? Why does it affect human beings and not animals? What might this tell us about our mind and body, language and creativity, music and religion? What are the boundaries between mental disorder and 'normality'? Is there a relationship between mental disorder and genius? These are some of the difficult but important questions that this book confronts, with the overarching aim of exploring what mental disorders can teach us about human nature and the human condition. Dr Neel Burton qualified in neuroscience and medicine from the University of London and is a Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He is the the author of several books, including a prize-winning textbook of psychiatry and a prize-winning self-help book for people with schizophrenia. He lives and teaches in Oxford.

State of Madness
State of Madness

Author: Rebecca Reich

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-03-13

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 1609092333

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What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. State of Madness examines the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol'pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between those narratives and their life stories. The state, they suggested in their own psychiatrically themed texts, had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. In their unsanctioned poetry and prose, the writers Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, and Venedikt Erofeev similarly engaged with psychiatric discourse to probe where creativity ended and insanity began. Together, these dissenters cast themselves as psychiatrists to a sick society. By challenging psychiatry's right to declare them or what they wrote insane, dissenters exposed as a self-serving fiction the state's renewed claims to rationality and modernity in the post-Stalin years. They were, as they observed, like the child who breaks the spell of collective delusion in Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." In a society where normality means insisting that the naked monarch is clothed, it is the truth-teller who is pathologized. Situating literature's encounter with psychiatry at the center of a wider struggle over authority and power, this bold interdisciplinary study will appeal to literary specialists; historians of culture, science, and medicine; and scholars and students of the Soviet Union and its legacy for Russia today.

A Philosophy of Madness
A Philosophy of Madness

Author: Wouter Kusters

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2020-12-01

Total Pages: 769

ISBN-13: 0262044285

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The philosophy of psychosis and the psychosis of philosophy: a philosopher draws on his experience of madness. In this book, philosopher and linguist Wouter Kusters examines the philosophy of psychosis—and the psychosis of philosophy. By analyzing the experience of psychosis in philosophical terms, Kusters not only emancipates the experience of the psychotic from medical classification, he also emancipates the philosopher from the narrowness of textbooks and academia, allowing philosophers to engage in real-life praxis, philosophy in vivo. Philosophy and madness—Kusters's preferred, non-medicalized term—coexist, one mirroring the other. Kusters draws on his own experience of madness—two episodes of psychosis, twenty years apart—as well as other first-person narratives of psychosis. Speculating about the maddening effect of certain words and thought, he argues, and demonstrates, that the steady flow of philosophical deliberation may sweep one into a full-blown acute psychotic episode. Indeed, a certain kind of philosophizing may result in confusion, paradoxes, unworldly insights, and circular frozenness reminiscent of madness. Psychosis presents itself to the psychotic as an inescapable truth and reality. Kusters evokes the mad person's philosophical or existential amazement at reality, thinking, time, and space, drawing on classic autobiographical accounts of psychoses by Antonin Artaud, Daniel Schreber, and others, as well as the work of phenomenological psychiatrists and psychologists and such phenomenologists as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He considers the philosophical mystic and the mystical philosopher, tracing the mad undercurrent in the Husserlian philosophy of time; visits the cloud castles of mystical madness, encountering LSD devotees, philosophers, theologians, and nihilists; and, falling to earth, finds anxiety, emptiness, delusions, and hallucinations. Madness and philosophy proceed and converge toward a single vanishing point.

Madness
Madness

Author: Petteri Pietikäinen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-05-15

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1317484452

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Madness: A History is a thorough and accessible account of madness from antiquity to modern times, offering a large-scale yet nuanced picture of mental illness and its varieties in western civilization. The book opens by considering perceptions and experiences of madness starting in Biblical times, Ancient history and Hippocratic medicine to the Age of Enlightenment, before moving on to developments from the late 18th century to the late 20th century and the Cold War era. Petteri Pietikäinen looks at issues such as 18th century asylums, the rise of psychiatry, the history of diagnoses, the experiences of mental health patients, the emergence of neuroses, the impact of eugenics, the development of different treatments, and the late 20th century emergence of anti-psychiatry and the modern malaise of the worried well. The book examines the history of madness at the different levels of micro-, meso- and macro: the social and cultural forces shaping the medical and lay perspectives on madness, the invention and development of diagnoses as well as the theories and treatment methods by physicians, and the patient experiences inside and outside of the mental institution. Drawing extensively from primary records written by psychiatrists and accounts by mental health patients themselves, it also gives readers a thorough grounding in the secondary literature addressing the history of madness. An essential read for all students of the history of mental illness, medicine and society more broadly.

Hegel's Theory of Madness
Hegel's Theory of Madness

Author: Daniel Berthold-Bond

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1995-01-01

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780791425053

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This book shows how an understanding of the nature and role of insanity in Hegel's writing provides intriguing new points of access to many of the central themes of his larger philosophic project. Berthold-Bond situates Hegel's theory of madness within the history of psychiatric practice during the great reform period at the turn of the eighteenth century, and shows how Hegel developed a middle path between the stridently opposed camps of "empirical" and "romantic" medicine, and of "somatic" and "psychical" practitioners. A key point of the book is to show that Hegel does not conceive of madness and health as strictly opposing states, but as kindred phenomena sharing many of the same underlying mental structures and strategies, so that the ontologies of insanity and rationality involve a mutually illuminating, mirroring relation. Hegel's theory is tested against the critiques of the institution of psychiatry and the very concept of madness by such influential twentieth-century authors as Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz, and defended as offering a genuinely reconciling position in the contemporary debate between the "social labeling" and "medical" models of mental illness.

What is Madness?
What is Madness?

Author: Darian Leader

Publisher: Penguin Books

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 9780141047355

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What separates the sane from the mad? How hard or easy is it to tell them apart? And what if the difference is really between being mad and going mad? In this landmark work Darian Leader undermines common conceptions of madness. Through case studies like that of the apparently 'normal' Harold Shipman, he shows that madness rarely conforms to the images we might expect. By exploring the idea of 'quiet madness' - that psychosis and an uneventful normal life are absolutely compatible - he argues that we must radically revise our understanding of madness. Once we realise that psychosis can be stable and contained, we have valuable tools to help those who have been less fortunate and whose psychosis has already been triggered. 'Fascinating. A formidable grasp of psychiatric history and a storyteller's flair for detail. What Leader does so effectively is to give us a sense of what it might be like to live inside the mind of a psychotic. A humane and timely book.' New Statesman 'Superb insights, brilliant.' Observer 'Leader's insights could have radical consequences for the way we regard madness.' Daily Telegraph 'Witty, probing. A myth-busting diagnosis of the method in our madness.' Independent 'Provides valuable insights into how psychiatry can help those who have suffered psychosis to rebuild their lives.' Sunday Times

Defining Mental Disorder
Defining Mental Disorder

Author: Luc Faucher

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2021-02-16

Total Pages: 641

ISBN-13: 0262045648

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Philosophers discuss Jerome Wakefield's influential view of mental disorder as "harmful dysfunction," with detailed responses from Wakefield himself. One of the most pressing theoretical problems of psychiatry is the definition of mental disorder. Jerome Wakefield's proposal that mental disorder is "harmful dysfunction" has been both influential and widely debated; philosophers have been notably skeptical about it. This volume provides the first book-length collection of responses by philosophers to Wakefield's harmful dysfunction analysis (HDA), offering a survey of philosophical critiques as well as extensive and detailed replies by Wakefield himself.