Women and Madness

Melampus is a seer-healer of Greek myth attributed with having healed the young princesses of Argos of madness. Analysis of this legend and its sources sheds light on the early stages of the “medicalizing” shift in the history of ancient Greek medicine. Retrospective psychological diagnosis suggests that the descriptions of the youths’ madness rose from actual observation of behavioral and mental disorders. Melampus is credited with having healed them by administering hellebore. Pharmacological analysis of botanical specimens proves that Helleborus niger features actual neurological properties effective in the treatment of mental disorders. The discussion aims at examining the rational aspects of the treatment of mental conditions in Greco-Roman antiquity.

In her new book, Psychiatry and The Business Of Madness, Bonnie Burstow raises a series of critical questions for the future of psychiatry as a “legitimate” branch of medicine and as a capitalist industry designed to make profit: How has psychiatry managed to become globalized, and in the process, so completely naturalized that we forget to question its mere existence, never mind the ways in which it operates? How are we implicated in the process of physical and chemical incarcerations planned and implemented by the business of psychiatry?

This study used qualitative research methods to investigate the problem of sexual coercion among female psychiatric patients in India. Consecutive female admissions (n = 146) to the inpatient unit of a psychiatric hospital in southern India were screened regarding coercive sexual experiences. Women who reported coercion (n = 50; 34%) participated in a semi-structured interview to learn more about their experiences. Among these women, 24 (48%) reported that the perpetrator was their spouse, 13 (26%) identified a friend or acquaintance, and 10 (20%) identified a relative such as an uncle or cousin. Most experiences occurred in the women's homes. Thirty of the 50 coerced women (60%) reported that they had not disclosed their experience to anyone, and that they had not sought help. Women revealed a sense of helplessness, fear, and secrecy related to their experiences. The problem of sexual coercion is seldom addressed in mental health care in India; the prevalence and severity of such experiences warrant immediate clinical attention and continued research.

There is growing international resistance to the oppressiveness of psychiatry. While previous books have critiqued psychiatry, Psychiatry Disrupted goes beyond theorizing what is wrong with it to theorizing how we might stop it. With chapters by Robert Menzies and Peter Beresford, Ian Parker, AJ Withers, China Mills, Tina Minkowitz, Chris Chapman, amongst others - See more at: http://www.mqup.ca/psychiatry-disrupted-products-9780773543300.php?page_id=46&#sthash.YR95EJhU.dpuf

A queer theory informed analysis of the findings of an ethnographic study detailing the experiences of children in relation to diagnosis within a psychiatric hospital is provided in this article. The perspective of the diagnosing psychiatrist in relation to symptoms and diagnoses is compared to the children's understandings, along with an analysis of the consequences of the normative approach inherent to bio-medical psychiatrization. The dehumanising process of psychiatric diagnosis, which strips people of their dignity, leads to what we have termed psychiatrised abjection. The act of diagnosis is shown not only to categorize, but also to 'other', to make abject and to make queer.

After dozens of historical monographs, biographies, and even postmortem clinical studies, Queen Juana of Castile continues to be an enigmatic figure. "Juana of Castile" analyzes modern reinventions of Juana in literature and the other arts. The essays, most of which appear here for the first time, focus on the historical revisionism of recent approaches to this figure. This history of the Mad Queen continues to generate new creative works, new stories that maintain a constant dialogue with the enormous bibliography and iconography that exists and continues to expand around her memory. Focusing on literary, pictorial, operatic, and screen representations of Queen Juana, this is the first interdisciplinary book that looks at both sides of the story - history and myth, fact and fiction - shaping the image of this much-maligned Spanish queen.

Title: Juana of Castile : history and myth of the mad queen
edited by María A. Gómez, Santiago Juan-Navarro, and Phyllis Zatlin.
Published: Lewisburg : Bucknell University Press, c2008.
Description: 267 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary:

"Focusing on pictorial, literary, screen, and operatic representations of Juana of Castile, History and Myth of the Mad Queen is the first interdisciplinary book that incorporates both sides of the coin (history and myth; fact and fiction) that shaped the enigmatic image of this much maligned Spanish queen." "Even though the fictional reinvention of Juana of Castile has been the subject of sporadic articles, this is the first time that an English-language reader has access to a book that takes an in-depth look at the panorama of literary, pictorial, musical, and cinematic recreations of this fascinating historical character. The editors' aim is to incorporate works of authors from different countries (Spain, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, France) and an entire spectrum of literary genres (narrative, poetry, theater, essay), as well as opera and the visual arts."--BOOK JACKET.

Contents: Introduction: Juana of Castile : from romanticism to the twenty-first century / María Asunción Gómez, Santiago Juan-Navarro, and Phyllis Zatlin -- Queen Juana : legend and history / Bethany Aram -- Juana I of Castile, Catherine of Aragon, and the failure of feminine power in the construction of empire / Elena Gascón Vera --Necrophilia, madness, and degeneration in Manuel Tamayo y Baus's La locura de amor (1855) / David R. George, Jr. -- The historical truth and aesthetic truth of Santa Juana de Castilla by Benito Pérez Galdós / José Luis Mora García -- Ramón Gómez de la Serna's superhistory : an original approach to the life of Joana of Castile / Mercedes Tasende -- Juana the Mad as a prototype of Federico García Lorca's Andalusian martyr complex / Salvatore Poeta -- Juana of Castile, reader of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam : an interpretation of Manuel Martínez Mediero's Juana del amor hermoso / Vilma Navarro-Daniels -- The spectacle of the other : madness in Falsa crónica de Juana la Loca / Becky Boling -- Is there a method to her madness? : the representation of Juana of Castile in French literature / Tara Foster -- Jeanne de Castille at center stage : the Spanish Queen in recent French theater / Phyllis Zatlin -- Madness as nationalistic spectacle : Juana and the myths of nineteenth-century historical painting / María Elena Soliño -- Juana la coloratura / Jan Reinhart -- Political madness : Juan de Orduña's Locura de amor as a national allegory / Santiago Juan-Navarro -- Woman, nation, and desire in Juan de Orduña's Locura de amor and Vicente Aranda's Juana la Loca / María Asunción Gómez -- Portraits and paintings / Pedro López Gómez.

ISBN: 0838757049 (alk. paper)
40015845122
9780838757048 (alk. paper)
UPC: 40015845122
Subjects, general: Juana -- la Loca, Queen of Castile -- 1479-1555 -- In literature
Spanish literature -- History and criticism
Other author(s),etc: Gómez, María A. 1964-
Juan Navarro, Santiago 1960-
Zatlin, Phyllis 1938-
Format: Book

Problems of Identity was the first essay to explore gender issues in art therapy. It looks at the construction of gender, representations of women in psychiatric discourse (including the gendered clinical gaze); some feminist ideas about representations of gender, and suggestions towards a feminist art therapy. It is probably still the single most important essay written in the arts therapies on gender.




Cite this work as follows: Hogan, S. 1997. Problems of Identity Deconstructing Gender in Art Therapy in Hogan, S. (ed.) Feminist Approaches to Art Therapy. London: Routledge. pp.21-48.

Résumé : Quel processus de décision politique a présidé à la réforme de l’enseignement de la psychiatrie et à l’introduction de la psychanalyse dans les universités françaises ? Dans la société d’après-guerre, le statut des médecins psychiatres a changé au terme de la crise politique de « Mai 68 ». Le Ministre de l’Enseignement Supérieur, Edgar Faure (1908–1988), est crédité d’avoir lancé la réforme (« Loi Faure », 1968) qui a fait de la psychiatrie une spécialité médicale à part entière, indépendante de la neurologie, et d’avoir promu la place de la psychanalyse dans les sciences humaines et sociales, en permettant la création d’un premier Département de Psychanalyse à l’Université expérimentale de Vincennes (1971). Mais la modification du statut de psychiatre est aussi l’aboutissement de nombreuses années de revendication, elle suit des mesures préconisées par le Livre Blanc de la psychiatrie française (1965–1968), publié sous la direction d’Henri Ey (1900–1977). Partant, il est tentant de reconstruire le processus de décision politique en reprenant la thèse d’une minorité active, à la fois conseiller du prince et capable de canaliser le mécontentement de groupes minoritaires, comme cela a été fait auparavant par le sociologue Haroun Jamous pour la réforme des études médicales (« Loi Debré », 1958). Mais qui sont ces acteurs ? Peut-on identifier un réseau dans l’entourage du Ministre ? Sans trancher entre plusieurs types d’interprétation des faits, l’auteur insiste sur les cercles de sociabilité intellectuelle impliqués dans la réforme.

The focus of this article will be Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s thoroughly anthologized story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892). Beyond the patriarchal perception of the narrator as progressively falling into madness, this study aims to prove that, in line with some feminist readings of the story (e.g. Haney-Peritz, 1986), the unnamed female protagonist consciously elaborates a mad language and discourse as part of her strategy to fight patriarchy from within. A careful study of this language will break the reader’s initial illusion that the protagonist is mad and will show how she finally embraces the rational discourse of medicine to perpetrate her revenge.

This collection takes as its starting point the ubiquitous representation of various forms of mental illness, breakdown and psychopathology in Caribbean writing, and the fact that this topic has been relatively neglected in criticism, especially in Anglophone texts, apart from the scholarship devoted to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The contributions to this volume demonstrate that much remains to be done in rethinking the trope of “madness” across Caribbean literature by local and diaspora writers. This book asks how focusing on literary manifestations of apparent mental aberration can extend our understanding of Caribbean narrative and culture, and can help us to interrogate the norms that have been used to categorize art from the region, as well as the boundaries between notions of rationality, transcendence and insanity across cultures.

The article analyses opera as a place which generates unhealthy excitement in men while being dangerous for women. This is the central theme of Opera, a horror directed by the Italian master of the genre, Dario Argento. The film, which tells the story of a young singer stalked by a madman, may be interpreted as a metaphor for the conservative sexual politics of the opera house. Argento's work is an excellent introduction to the discussion that swept across American musicology in the early 1990s, about the gender analysis of European musical culture; a discussion that can be summarised in the question: is the opera house a place where women are oppressed or, on the contrary, is it a space for their emancipation?

Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1997), a neo-Victorian classic biofictional novel about a nineteenth-century murderess, is interpreted in this chapter as a narrative of a madwoman, that is, a narrative which undercuts a possibility of a coherent representation of the self. Her “inability to speak”—fragmentation, instability and incompleteness of her narrative—is what makes it queer; its queerness is based in its refusal to be within the doctor-listener’s/reader’s grasp. Grace’s (mad) story, via its narrative “failure” to offer a linear, coherent account, becomes the epitome of queer subversiveness. The chapter also discusses the television adaptation of Atwood’s novel the to examine alternative techniques used in the adaptive medium to express the instabilities and the incoherence of the self, and to examine if Grace Marks of the television show is also, indeed, a (queer) madwoman.

Using an interdisciplinary approach, my dissertation examines the intersection of womanhood and madness in German-language literature and culture. While scholars have studied the madwoman of the previous centuries extensively, my dissertation presents the first comprehensive study of representations of female madness from 1894 onward. Since the late 19th century, female authors from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have been appropriating discourses of madness in order to critique the contradictory ramifications of mandatory adherence to the construct of femininity. Employing theories of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, I argue that the madness discourse represents a key site where writers negotiate the ongoing hegemony of societal ideologies defining the special status of the female psyche, body and sexuality as entities which need to be monitored, shaped or optimized. My research thus redeploys female madness as a research category. While previously applied almost exclusively to the realities of white middle-class women, I argue for an intersectional conception of critical madness studies which takes account of gender, race, and religion to offer culturally specific insights into the lives of German women from diverse backgrounds. My study addresses texts by well-known authors, such as Hedwig Dohm, Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Elfriede Jelinek, as well as lesser-known writers, such as May Ayim and Christine Lavant. (written in German)

PALABRAS CLAVE: Homeland, Sully, Clint Eastwood, locura, compromiso,
héroe

Mediante el análisis de algunas escenas seleccionadas del último capítulo de la sexta temporada de Homeland y de la película Sully, reflexiono sobre el origen etimológico del término “compromiso” y su relación con la figura del héroe. ¿Son ámbitos diferenciados, irreconciliables o, en momentos determinados, él héroe puede lidiar con cierta locura que implicaría la realización del acto heroico, de un compromiso con su sociedad?.

KEYWORDS: Homeland, Sully, Clint Eastwood, madness, engagement, hero

Through the analysis of selected scenes from the last chapter of Homeland's sixth season and the film Sully, I reflect on the etymological origin of the term “commitment” and its relation to the hero‟s character. Do they belong to different or irreconcilable areas, or at certain moments, can the hero deal with a certain madness that would imply the accomplishment of the heroic act, of a commitment to his/her society?.

Using a sample of six articles from Canadian News sources, this paper looks at how the death of nineteen-year-old Ashley Smith at the Grand Valley Prison for Women near Kitchener Waterloo was framed by the Canadian print news media in 2007 (the year of her death) and between 2012-2015 when her mother Coralee Smith attempted (and eventually succeeded in) having the initial ruling of suicide overturned by a jury who found Smith died by homicide. I attend to whether themes of monstrosity, grievability, and mental illness were present in media coverage of the case affecting the extent to which Ashley is framed as a person whose life and death are of consequence. The terms, images, and frames used by the media to describe Smith have the capacity to participate in infantilizing, Othering, and discounting the validity of Smith’s suffering within the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) (Wahl 343). Conversely, the media also has the capacity to emphasize the systemic devaluation of criminalized and incarcerated people, thereby calling not only on state actors, but also on readers to consider how we are implicated in the categorization of some lives as worthy of care during life and grievable in death, and others as threatening and dangerous being in life, and ungrievable in death (Cohen Visions 5-6; Baun 31).

Ali Smith'in "Tarihin Tarihi" adlı kısa öyküsü on sayfalık bir öykü olmasına rağmen, satır araları da dikkate alındığında çok daha uzun bir öyküye dönüşmektedir. Cinsiyeti belirtilmemiş bir gencin ebeveynleri ve ödevi hakkındaki basit anlatısı aracılığı ile Smith kadınların toplumdaki konumuna dair çok ciddi meseleleri oldukça düşündürücü bir biçimde ele almaktadır. Yalnızca annenin içinde bulunduğu durumu, gencin tepkisini ve kısa diyalogları ortaya koyarak, okuruna kadınlık durumu ile ilgili pek çok fikir vermektedir. Bu makalenin amacı bahsi geçen fikirleri öykünün satır aralarını okumak suretiyle ortaya çıkarmak ve aynı zamanda bu İskoç yazarın sıra dışı üslubunu kadın meselelerine farklı bir yaklaşım olarak tanıtmaktır. Makalenin odak noktası kadınların ataerkil sistem tarafından kendilerine atfedilen kadınlık rolünü reddettikleri takdirde delilikle suçlanmaları sorunudur. Makale erkek bakışıyla şekillendirilmiş eş ve anne olmaktan ibaret kadınlık rolünü ve bu rolün kadını eve hapsederek üzerine yüklediği görevlerle bir kadın ve delilik meselesi haline getirilişini feminist kuramcılar ve psikoloji uzmanlarına atıfla tarihsel bir çerçevede irdelemektedir.

En este estudio se abordan dos figuras claves de la literatura universal, Ana Ozores, la Regenta, y Jane Eyre. Esta aproximación se realiza desde un punto de vista feminista y comparado, pero sin olvidar las características esenciales de ambos personajes ni el contexto de la novela en el que se insertan. Aunque las dos heroínas pertenecen a tradiciones literarias muy distintas, se señalarán sus numerosas similitudes. Especialmente, nos detendremos en las relacionadas con el conflicto que ambas viven con la sociedad patriarcal de su época, y en el deseo que manifiestan de transgredir las normas impuestas desde esta. Las dificultades a afrontar, unidas a su propia marginalidad, las llevarán a la enfermedad y la locura, pero su destino final no podría ser más distinto. Trataremos de intuir las claves del éxito de una y del fracaso de la otra.

Artykuł jest próbą scharakteryzowania i określenia ewentualnych ram gatunkowych dla zjawiska literackiego jakim są kobiece autobiografie i wspomnienia podejmujące temat hospitalizacji w szpitalu psychiatrycznym bądź doświadczenia choroby psychicznej, które stanowią przedmiot zainteresowania zarówno humanistyki (teoria autobiografii, antropologia literatury, somatopoetyka, etc.) jak i dziedzin pokrewnych medycynie (medycyna narracyjna czy socjologia medycyny). Analiza historyczna zjawiska oraz próba rekonstrukcji tego rodzaju dyskursu z narracji histeryczek produkowanych w gabinetach psychoanalityków uzupełniona jest przez studium przypadku, jakim są wspomnienia Kay Redfield Jamison „Niespokojny umysł”, praktykującej klinicystki cierpiącej z powodu psychozy maniakalno-depresyjnej.

Disability studies generally aim at an analysis of how an impairment becomes a disability due to the society’s definitions of normativity which do not encompass less-than-perfect bodies. Ever since its appearance in 1990s disability studies has focused on cultural and social contexts, thus going beyond the medical and biological discourse of disability. Consequently, a natural step in its development has been to combine disability studies with issues of race, class, gender and sexuality. Such agendas of disability studies as denaturalisation of disability and inclusion of dismissed (disabled) bodies give disability studies and feminism a common ground, thus leading to an emergence of feminist disability studies. Its focus on both feminine and disabled body as a source of identity and a struggle with stereotypes of the female disabled are the most often discussed aspects. The issue of mental disability, however, has not been as yet thoroughly researched. As a theory used for the study of literature, it has been proposed and applied by Elizabeth J. Donaldson. In her “The Corpus of the Madwoman” (2002) she put forward a hypothesis that a madwoman is not an avatar of a rebellious feminist but a corporealised reality. This view has been backed by Andrea Nicki in her paper “The Abused Mind” (2001), where she searches for a trauma, especially a bodily and a sexual one, to explain female insanity and fight with its stereotypes. This view will become the starting point for the analysis of the theme of female madness in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. Using feminist disability studies, this paper will discuss Grace Mark’s relation to her body and her femininity as well as traumas in her past to examine the function of the motif of madness in Atwood’s novel and its role in the overall interpretation of the book.