Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors

by Lisa Appignanesi

Overview

“[A work of] wit, wisdom and richness. . . . A grand tour of derangement, from matricide to anorexia.” —John Leonard, Harper’s

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. Lisa Appignanesi charts a story from the days when the mad were considered possessed to our own century when the official psychiatric manual lists some 350 mental disorders. Women play a key role here, both as patients—among them Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Marilyn Monroe—and as therapists. Controversially, Appignanesi argues that women have significantly changed the nature of mind-doctoring, but in the process they have also inadvertently highlighted new patterns of illness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393335439
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/01/2009
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	554
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.24(h) x 1.12(d)

About the Author

Lisa Appignanesi, is the author of Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors and All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion. A prize-winning novelist and writer, she is the president of English PEN. She lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

"Fascinating. . . . A meticulous and exhaustive account."

Kathryn Harrison

"Sophisticated, vigorously written, full of striking subtexts . . .an entertaining and well-researched book that avoids easy answers."

Times Literary Supplement - Andrew Scull

"Ambitious . . . brilliant . . . a powerhouse of a book."

New York Sun - Daphne Merkin

Award-winning British novelist Appignanesi (The Memory Man) has written a fascinating if somewhat diffuse study of how, over the past two centuries, women's ability to live creative lives has been controlled by culture, and how their unsuccessful attempts to rebel frequently lead to mental illness-itself a slippery, ever-evolving cultural concept. Appignanesi's sources are wide-ranging but largely literary, based upon letters, diaries, articles and fiction from feminist writers such as Betty Friedan, historians like R.D. Laing and Jacque Lacan, psychologists such as Melanie Klein, and troubled subjects like Zelda Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. Beginning with the lives of mentally ill women in the 19th century, Appignanesi moves chronologically through the history of psychology-as ideas like schizophrenia replace earlier notions of hysteria-and its relationship to the creative woman, using in-depth profiles of Virginia Woolf, Alice James and others. Looking at the complex cultural, political and familial circumstances under which mental illness emerges, and their implications for the present (in which depression and eating disorders have become major problems), Appignanesi convincingly asserts that "symptoms and diagnoses... cluster to create cultural fashions in illness and cure," suggesting provocatively that "what is at issue here is not psychic disorder so much as social deterioration of a radical kind."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly