Depression can be a state of absence of feeling, therefore if one is depressed it would be an achievement – and a step in the right direction – to feel sad or angry. I also know, as much as I hate to depend on a chalky tablet no bigger than my fingernail that my life is vastly improved because someone started with Prozac. 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, when more and more of our inner life and emotions have become a matter for medics and therapists. Gradually, however, doctors came to feel that treatments, from isolation rooms to Freud’s ‘talking cure’ to ECT to all the assorted drugs, old and new.

Anorexia does not kill off more women in that age group than any other cause, never mind *12 times* as many deaths as any other single cause. Informative in startling ways, and never dull in the academic way, Appignanesi's genuinely new History of the Mind Doctors is a subtle and accessible account of that perhaps most daunting of modern relationships, the one between the Mind Doctor and his female patient.The theory of menstrual madness held a tight grip on the understanding of even the most prominent of nineteenth-century physicians. The use of famous women’s lives and writings, such as Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and Marilyn Monroe work as case studies of both depth and breadth.

Sigmund Freud’s famous question was originally put to Princess Marie Bonaparte, patient, friend and analyst, the moving force behind Freud’s flight from Nazi Vienna to his final home in London, now the Freud Museum. Not all of these will make the final list but the more diagnostic categories there are, the more business there is for therapists and the more potential profit for drug companies. Appignanesi demonstrates how the conceptualisation of mental illness, particularly but not exclusively in women, has changed repeatedly and significantly.

In this dissertation, I conduct a close, hermeneutic reading of three autobiographical texts by women diagnosed with psychiatric disabilities who share their stories of madness: The Bell Jar (1963) an autobiographical novel by Sylvia Plath; An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995) by renowned clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison; and My Body is a Book of Rules (2014) a memoir by Elissa Washuta, a scholar, essayist, and member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe.

In fact, she did exhibit many erratic and theatrical behaviours that could be described as histrionic. She had a track record of lying about her sexual activities and throwing a tantrum when the lie was exposed. This one might not be false so much as misleading: She states that Clerambault "staged his own murder", which I found such a fascinating tidbit that I went looking for more information about how he tried to make his suicide look like a murder, and if he was trying to frame a particular person.Her reading of 'the most iconic mind doctor' is generous, although she examines in detail why Freud has been portrayed as sexist.

ABSTRACT This important essay looks at white female mental health in the British Raj in the second half of the nineteenth century. A fascinating history of both womens'role and how women have been treated by the psychiatric and psychoanalytical professions as they have evolved. 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. My conclusion was that I didn’t think he was mad but I was not so sure about those who bought his books. What did they make of their variously diagnosed nerves, melancholy, mania, obsession, self-mutilation, tics, possession, hysteria, desire and rebellion?

But as a perceived objective reporter, she has no business throwing in opinions at the end of paragraphs of history and assumed fact. The deeper I delved, the less credible the author seemed and as I finally read the last 4 pages I have been avoiding for a solid week, I felt judged and stigmatized. Despite wealth, whiteness, and a professional career, a diagnosis of mania and its resulting institutionalization reduced Ott to an easily dismissed and ultimately ridiculed madwoman.