Download or read book Defining Madness written by Peter Barry Shea and published by Hawkins Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ". . . 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.
Download or read book The Insanity of Madness written by Dr Daniel R Berger II and published by . This book was released on 2018-02-03 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Madness in Civilization written by Andrew Scull and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-06 with total page 12 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2015.
Download or read book The Meaning of Madness written by Neel L. Burton and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book State of Madness written by Rebecca Reich and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Madness written by Petteri Pietikäinen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-05-15 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Defining Mental Disorder written by Luc Faucher and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book What is Madness written by Darian Leader and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book Hegel s Theory of Madness written by Daniel Berthold-Bond and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A Philosophy of Madness written by Wouter Kusters and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Madness Explained written by Richard P Bentall and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2003-06-05 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revised edition of Madness Explained, Richard Bentall's groundbreaking classic on mental illness In Madness Explained, leading clinical psychologist Richard Bentall shatters the modern myths that surround psychosis. Is madness purely a medical condition that can be treated with drugs? Is there a clear dividing line between who is sane and who is insane? For this revised edition, he adds new material drawing on the recent advances in molecular genetics, new studies of the role of environment in psychosis, and important discoveries on early symptoms preceding illness, among other important developments in our understanding. 'Madness Explained is a substantial, yet highly accessible work. Full of insight and humanity, it deserves a wide readership.' Sunday Times 'Will give readers a glimpse both of answers to their own problems, and to questions about how the mind works' Independent Magazine Richard P. Bentall holds a Chair in Experimental Clinical Psychology at the University of Manchester. In 1989 he received the British Psychological Society's May Davidson Award for his contribution to the field of Clinical Psychology.
Download or read book Madness and Civilization written by Michel Foucault and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-01-30 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 - from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the "insane" and the rest of humanity.
Download or read book Black Madness written by Therí Alyce Pickens and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-07 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Black Madness :: Mad Blackness Therí Alyce Pickens rethinks the relationship between Blackness and disability, unsettling the common theorization that they are mutually constitutive. Pickens shows how Black speculative and science fiction authors such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tananarive Due craft new worlds that reimagine the intersection of Blackness and madness. These creative writer-theorists formulate new parameters for thinking through Blackness and madness. Pickens considers Butler's Fledgling as an archive of Black madness that demonstrates how race and ability shape subjectivity while constructing the building blocks for antiracist and anti-ableist futures. She examines how Hopkinson's Midnight Robber theorizes mad Blackness and how Due's African Immortals series contests dominant definitions of the human. The theorizations of race and disability that emerge from these works, Pickens demonstrates, challenge the paradigms of subjectivity that white supremacy and ableism enforce, thereby pointing to the potential for new forms of radical politics.
Download or read book The Madness of Epic written by Debra Hershkowitz and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1998-06-25 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Madness plays a vital role in many ancient epics: not only do characters go mad, but madness also often occupies a central thematic position in the texts. In this book, Debra Hershkowitz examines from a variety of theoretical angles the representation and poetic function of madness in Greek and Latin epic from Homer through the Flavians, including individual chapters devoted to the Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Lucan's Bellum Civile, and Statius' Thebaid. The study also addresses the difficulty of defining madness, and discusses how each epic explores this problem in a different way, finding its own unique way of conceptualizing madness. Epic madness interacts with ancient models of madness, but also, even more importantly, with previous representations of madness in the literary tradition. Likewise, the reader's response to epic madness is influenced by both ancient and modern views of madness, as well as by an awareness of intertextuality.
Download or read book The Chemical Imbalance Delusion written by Daniel R Berger II and published by . This book was released on 2019-03-27 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In The Chemical Imbalance Delusion, Berger presents a fresh and simplified navigational tool on a topic that is often overwhelming to those who have been told they have a chemical imbalance. This book is also a helpful resource for the caretakers, friends, families and others in a relationship with the impacted patient. For me, The Chemical Imbalance Delusion is a book I truly feel that anyone can pick up, read, and learn more about a subject we in the pharmaceutical industry are so passionate about, which is important. It has been my experience, that people who are told that their problems are caused by a chemical imbalance are left searching for answers, understanding, paths forward, help, and hope. This book serves as a well-presented guide and educational tool to help navigate such hardships and discover vital answers." - Katy Sorrells, CQA, Pharmaceutical Quality Engineer"The Nation and its mental disorders are controlled by psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies too often motivated by greed and maintained by pseudoscience. Millions of doses of poison are being sold and pushed on the public-though these chemicals are promoted as necessary medicines. Our only hope is to accept the truths being declared by people like Dr. Daniel Berger who beat the drum of truth loud enough for us to hear. Berger is a voice in the wilderness that must be heard, and this book, The Chemical Imbalance Delusion, needs to be read by everyone." - Joseph M. Cummins, DVM, PHD, Researcher and Pharmacologist"I am indebted to Dr. Berger for his exposé of the engineered deception of Big Pharma and its complicit professionals. I, too, was duped by the supposed pathophysiology of psychiatric disease based on the 'science' of neurotransmitter disequilibrium. While we have been able to quantify dysfunction in other organ symptoms, we as medical professionals and scientists have failed to do the same in the discipline of the mind and the brain. In The Chemical Imbalance Delusion, Dr. Berger has unraveled the morass of this deception steeped in the pursuit of profit and carried out in the name of pride. This information is integral to our care of the psyche/soul of our patients. He has shown that we can no longer, in good conscience, reach into our black box and judicially prescribe medicines that have no good evidence of efficacy and, in fact, cause significant harm to our patients." - Atam Abbi, MD "Dr. Berger's book is a great compilation of undeniable evidence that shows just how misleading the present standard of care is. We, as health care providers, canonly help people if we know and propagate the truth: the pill is NOT the solution. The mind must be renewed! It can be so harmful to take pills for decades and wrongly believe that medication melts away inner conflicts and/or fixes harmful or destructive behaviors. I am grateful to have read The Chemical Imbalance Delusion, as it clarifies so much of what I had suspected all these years; this discovery makes me enthusiastic, since it also encourages me to share my faith in the Lord who alone renews the mind." - Christina Biester, MD and Clinical Supervisor
Download or read book The Social Constructions and Experiences of Madness written by Monika dos Santos and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-02-01 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the centuries the meanings around mental illness have shifted many times according to societal beliefs and the political atmosphere of the day. The way madness is defined has far reaching effects on those who have a mental disorder, and determines how they are treated by the professionals responsible for their care, and the society of which they are a part. Although madness as mental illness seems to be the dominant Western view of madness, it is by no means the only view of what it means to be ‘mad’. The symptoms of madness or mental illness occur in all cultures of the world, but have different meanings in different social and cultural contexts. Evidence suggests that meanings of mental illness have a significant impact on subjective experience; the idioms used in the expression thereof, indigenous treatments, and subsequent outcomes. Thus, the societal understandings of madness are central to the problem of mental illness and those with the lived experience can lead the process of reconstructing this meaning.
Download or read book To Define True Madness written by Henry Yellowlees and published by . This book was released on 1955 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
