Women and Madness: Teaching Mental Illness as a Disability (original) (raw)
Related papers
International Journal of Practical and Pedagogical Issues in English Education, 2023
The study investigates the two novels of Jane Ayre and The Bell Jar, the aspects focus on the psychological matters. These matters are like mental instability and behavioural instability, also the madness. The forms of mental illnesses are many, the ones those are known commonly are linked to women as long as these women are not obedient. The mental instability occurs to several reasons and these reasons are mostly through the life of the women who face such conditions. The reasons are like the imprisonment of women and being locked. The other aspect is the role of the psychological pressure women suffer of and these psychological pressures are made of forms those are different.
The Bell Jar: An Inextricable Hysteria of a Woman Consequent of a Distorted Identity
History Research Journal, 2019
The portrayal of women as ‘Deviant’ has an elongated history. Even the world’s foremost religions and traditions dealing with spirituality often projected women as “uncontrollable.” In literature woman suffering from hysteria have been an engrossing subject. Hysteria as a female condition refers to emotional excess such as fear or panic. The term comes from the Greek word ‘hysterikos’, which means “of the womb.” It was originally seen as a neurotic condition associated with women.
The Female Mental Disorder as a Reaction to Patriarchal Practices in
2021
This paper aims at shedding light on the female mental disorder from a positive perspective. The connections between women’s gender, their mental disorder, and their psychological state are scrutinized within a feminist scope since the feminist approach is required in this context. Indeed, under the umbrella of feminism, women are able to reject oppression and discover their identity. Moreover, many female autobiographical novels, such as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, are recognised by the presence of women’s mental disorder. The findings reveal that gender and the patriarchal practices lie at the heart of women’s mental disorder, but, fortunately, the latter is considered as a form of rebellion rather than a form of weakness. Thus, this study emphasizes the fact that madness can lead to the formation of an integrated self and a free space away from the traditional social demands.
"Art and Mental Illness, An Art Historical Perspective"
Art and Mental Illness: Myths, Stereotypes and Realities, 2007
Alongside these developments are changes in consumer group attitudes to the display of art produced by people who experience mental illness. Consumer groups have reached the conclusion that such displays must respect the whole person and not focus exclusively on the relationship between the artwork and the mental illness of the creator. Consumers and consumer representatives have begun to argue that art should not be discussed through the use of diagnostic categories as such discussions have the potential to demean the creator by reducing them to a function of their illness.To take a prominent but little-known example, the widow of Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner sued her late husband's analyst in 1977 for exhibiting drawings produced by Pollock during therapy under the heading 'Psychoanalytic Drawings'. As she argued at the time:
Mental Illness and Imagination in Philosophy, Literature, and Psychiatry
Philosophy and Literature, 2013
can existential themes, such as anxiety, the will to die, or our simultaneous will to live forever be logically described? does a literary language or philosophical and psychiatric term exist that can express phenomena nonreferential to the external world? In short, does a genre exist that can redefine the relationships between symbol and meaning? drawing upon various theoretical perspectives developed by Michel Foucault, Ludwig Binswanger, gaston Bachelard, and Karl Jaspers, this paper discusses the ability to depict life as we are living it, whether it is a product of mental illness or a matter of normal schizophrenic imaginings. M ental illness and imaginings affect people of all ages, races, religions, and incomes. Mental illness as such is not the result of personal weakness, lack of character, or poor upbringing. Instead, mental illness shows incredible creativity in terms of behavior and thought. nevertheless, it also disrupts a person's thoughts, feelings, mood, ability to relate to others, and the capacity to cope with the ordinary demands of life. The understanding of mental illness as a medical condition includes diagnoses such as major depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder (ocd), panic disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTsd), and borderline personality disorder. In 2012, the american Psychiatric association (aPa) approved a set of updates, revisions, and changes to the reference manual used to diagnose mental disorders. The revision of the manual, called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (dsM), is the first significant update in nearly
Sonja Sekula and "Art of the Mentally Ill"
American Art, 2021
In the early-to-mid-twentieth century, modernist artists were fascinated by what was then called "art of the mentally ill." There are three nodal points in this history. First, in 1890, the pioneering German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin began to collect artwork by patients with severe mental illness at the Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic. Hans Prinzhorn published some of that collection as Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill) in 1922, and many well-known artists, such as Paul Klee, were inspired by the book. 1 Second, the sequel to the Museum of Modern Art's landmark exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art (1936) was Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (also 1936), which included examples of art of the "insane." 2 Third, beginning in 1945, the French artist Jean Dubuffet began to collect what he termed art brut (raw art), uncultured and purportedly pure art by outsiders, including people with mental illness. The collection was on view in the home of the artist Alfonso Ossorio in East Hampton, New York, from 1951 to 1962, when it returned to Paris and was established as the Compagnie de l'art brut. It lives on today as the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland. 3 As different as these moments were, they largely shared a psychoanalytic perspective-initially more Freudian, and later, more Jungian. 4 The art historian Hal Foster has characterized this long-standing interest in "art of the mentally ill" as a successor to artists' interest in "primitive" and children's art: "most modernists saw the art of the mentally ill according to their own ends only-as expressive of an aesthetic essence, revelatory of an innocent vision, or defiant of all convention-and for the most part it was none of these things.. .. [Yet they] bespeak modernist fantasies either of a pure origin of art or an absolute alterity to culture." 5 Clearly the modernist investment in "art of the mentally ill"-what today we would call art by people with mental illness-was deep and sustained, however self-interested. 6 What this interest, on the part of artists, and assessment, on the part of historians, fails to address, however, is modernist art by practicing artists who themselves had mental illnesses. Indeed, art historians have exerted much effort in separating art by formally trained professional artists from art produced by those who suffer from mental illness. The curator Alfred H. Barr Jr., for example, included art by the mentally ill in Fantastic Art, but it was deemed "non-art" in comparison with art by "normal" artists assumed to have no mental health conditions. 7 Later, Michel Thévoz, a historian of Art Brut, lamented that patients in psychiatric facilities were becoming increasingly aware of artistic trends and gaining rudimentary artistic training, which, in his view, spoiled their supposedly unfiltered access to the truth. He writes, for instance, "Institutes for
Crossing the Borderline (Personality): Madness Interrogated in Girl, Interrupted
This is a talk (unrevised) that I gave at a American Literature Association conference in Mexico in 1999. For obvious reasons, it is a companion piece to my talk "Grif, Interrupted," which it spawned many years later. I locate Kaysen's memoir in the context of contemporary disability memoir and discuss how she avoids certain pitfalls in the conventional genres and discourses used to narrate disability, mental illness in particular.