The myths in mental illness (original) (raw)
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The Sublime Object of Psychiatry: Schizophrenia in Clinical and Cultural Theory
Schizophrenia has been one of psychiatry's most contested diagnostic categories. It has also served as a metaphor for cultural theorists to interpret modern and postmodern understandings of the self. These radical, compelling, and puzzling appropriations of clinical accounts of schizophrenia have been dismissed by many as illegitimate, insensitive and inappropriate. Until now, no attempt has been made to analyse them systematically, nor has their significance for our broader understanding of this most 'ununderstandable' of experiences been addressed. The Sublime Object of Psychiatry analyses representations of schizophrenia across a wide range of disciplines and discourses: biological and phenomenological psychiatry, psychoanalysis, critical psychology, antipsychiatry, and postmodern philosophy. Part one looks at the foundational clinical accounts of schizophrenia, concentrating on the work of Emil Kraepelin, Eugen Bleuler, Karl Jaspers, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Part two examines how these accounts were critiqued, adapted, and mobilised in the 'cultural theory' of R D Laing, Thomas Szasz, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Louis Sass, Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard. Using the aesthetic concept of the sublime as an organising framework, the book seeks to explain how a clinical diagnostic category came to be transformed into a potent metaphor in cultural theory, and how, in that transformation, schizophrenia came to be associated with the everyday experience of modern and postmodern life. Susan Sontag once wrote: 'Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance'. The Sublime Object of Psychiatry does not provide an answer to the question 'What is schizophrenia?', but instead brings clinical and cultural theory into dialogue in order to explain how schizophrenia became 'awash in significance'.
Madness, Mythopoetry and Medicine
International Perspectives in Values-Based Mental Health Practice, 2020
This chapter draws on a detailed transgenerational case study, the story of ‘Masimbo’, which involves migration, to highlight the conceptualisation and journey of mental illness within an African cultural perspective. In Masimbo’s story, African understandings of mental disorder are side-lined by Western approaches with untoward consequences for him and his family. The implication that is drawn from this, however, is not that African perspectives should replace Western approaches but rather that they should be used together. Thus, Masimbo’s story is illuminated with comments woven in from both an African (Yoruba traditional conceptualisation) and a systemic psychotherapy perspective. This shows how respecting both perspectives is possible and preferable from a person-centred point of view as different narratives/understandings are foregrounded and backgrounded like a tapestry, promoting an approach in which mental illness and the nuances that culture brings, is appreciated and worke...
Mental Illness and Imagination in Philosophy, Literature, and Psychiatry
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.
Division Review, 2023
This paper draws a geometrical comparison between the psychical movement between sanity and madness and the movement that takes place at Anne Carson's "edge" in her discussion of Eros. Psychosis revolves around this same edge at which “the soul parts on itself in desire [and] is conceived as a dilemma of body and senses” (Carson p. 7). The psychotic individual reaches across this edge where breath breaches the boundary that separates internal from external, self from other, and temporarily exists in the space where metaphor conjoins the two in hallucination. Psychosis is the attempt to find a solution to the unsolvable problem of our existence. Of language, of perception, of desire, of the mind and of the self, of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and of the Real. It sits out at the farther edges, where things get strange, strange when the limits of our perception get mixed up and truth becomes a proxy for God.
Metaphors of Madness in Narratives of Schizophrenia
Madness in Context: Historical, Poetic and Artistic Narratives
in Jerusalem 'There must be some words,' the doctor said. 'Try to find them, and let us share them together.' 'It's a metaphor-you wouldn't understand it.' 'Perhaps you could explain it then.' 1 This quote, taken from one of the best known narratives of schizophrenia I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, encapsulates the main interests of this paper-the experience of madness and its metaphoric representation in autobiographical literature written by people diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. The image of madness It is no mere chance that the psychiatric category of schizophrenia is brought forward in a conference dealing with exploring the boundaries of madness. The image of the raving madman, suffering from hallucinations and delusions, disordered in his thoughts, feelings and social connections, cast aside to the outskirts of society, corresponds closely to the stigmatizing image of schizophrenia. It seems that this diagnosis captures the sheer image of madness, and that this archetypal image of the madman, as represented in art, literature as well as in popular culture, is as old as humankind itself.
2015
The loss of reason, a sense of alienation from the commonsense world we all like to imagine we inhabit, the shattering emotional turmoil that seizes hold and won't let go--these are some of the traits we associate with madness. Today, mental disturbance is most commonly viewed through a medical lens, but societies have also sought to make sense of it through religion or the supernatural, or by constructing psychological or social explanations in an effort to tame the demons of unreason. Madness in Civilization traces the long and complex history of this affliction and our attempts to treat it. Beautifully illustrated throughout, Madness in Civilization takes readers from antiquity to today, painting a vivid and often harrowing portrait of the different ways that cultures around the world have interpreted and responded to the seemingly irrational, psychotic, and insane. From the Bible to Sigmund Freud, from exorcism to mesmerism, from Bedlam to Victorian asylums, from the theory of humors to modern pharmacology, the book explores the manifestations and meanings of madness, its challenges and consequences, and our varied responses to it. It also looks at how insanity has haunted the imaginations of artists and writers and describes the profound influence it has had on the arts, from drama, opera, and the novel to drawing, painting, and sculpture. Written by one of the world's preeminent historians of psychiatry, Madness in Civilization is a panoramic history of the human encounter with unreason.
Schizophrenia: the sacred symbol of psychiatry
The British Journal of Psychiatry, 1976
Let us try to project ourselves back into the places and minds of physicians and psychiatrists in, say, 1900. When they spoke of disease, what did they mean? They meant, typically, something like syphilis. ‘Know syphilis in all its manifestations and relations,’ declared Sir William Osler (1849–1919), ‘and all things clinical will be added unto you.’ (1). Obviously, this is no longer true. Indeed, how many cases of syphilis do modern medical students see between the time they enroll in school and the time they graduate? In the United States,…
2015
The loss of reason, a sense of alienation from the commonsense world we all like to imagine we inhabit, the shattering emotional turmoil that seizes hold and won't let go--these are some of the traits we associate with madness. Today, mental disturbance is most commonly viewed through a medical lens, but societies have also sought to make sense of it through religion or the supernatural, or by constructing psychological or social explanations in an effort to tame the demons of unreason. Madness in Civilization traces the long and complex history of this affliction and our attempts to treat it. Beautifully illustrated throughout, Madness in Civilization takes readers from antiquity to today, painting a vivid and often harrowing portrait of the different ways that cultures around the world have interpreted and responded to the seemingly irrational, psychotic, and insane. From the Bible to Sigmund Freud, from exorcism to mesmerism, from Bedlam to Victorian asylums, from the theory of humors to modern pharmacology, the book explores the manifestations and meanings of madness, its challenges and consequences, and our varied responses to it. It also looks at how insanity has haunted the imaginations of artists and writers and describes the profound influence it has had on the arts, from drama, opera, and the novel to drawing, painting, and sculpture. Written by one of the world's preeminent historians of psychiatry, Madness in Civilization is a panoramic history of the human encounter with unreason.