Mad, Bad And Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present

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From Freud and Jung and the radical breakthroughs of psychoanalysis to Lacan's construction of a modern movement and the new women-centred therapies.

By diagnosing Ott with mania, state hospital physicians created and reinforced geographical boundaries on her daily activities, lessened her already limited legal rights, restricted her future, and rewrote her past.The Eysenck Personality Profiler (EPP: Eysenck et al, 1999) is a contender to replace the DSM but there are others, such as the Big-5, as well as tailored instruments like those of Millon (2008). Many psychologists are concerned about the use of diagnostic systems that classify maladaptive behaviours as illnesses when they are better understood as being on a continuum with normality. This paper will focus on representations of mad women, such as Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre, as well as the violent murderesses of Victorian sensation and crime fiction and show how their 'madness' is linked to sociological constructs of the body and in particular, to menstruation.

There is also a great deal of material about how motherhood and mental health have been linked, for example the successive fashions for blaming women for not being warm and loving enough, then too warm and loving. But as a perceived objective reporter, she has no business throwing in opinions at the end of paragraphs of history and assumed fact. It has been suggested that positive experiences such as a happy childhood divert them from a life of crime, but high IQ might be their real salvation.

Despite all this, I refused to attach the HPD label because I felt it would have only descriptive (not medical) value and might have been used unfairly to discredit her. Brandon showed an extraordinary understanding of her own condition and of her sexuality; she was one of the first British patients whose case notes diagnosed her as having 'Freudian' problems.