Why Talk About Madness

This short book argues for the relevance of historical perspectives on mental health, exploring how these histories can and should inform debates about mental healthcare today. Why is it important to study the history of madness? What does it mean to voice these histories? What can these tell us about the challenges and legacies of mental health care across the world today? Offering an intervention into new ways of thinking – and talking – about ‘mad’ history, Catharine Coleborne explores the social and cultural impact of the history of the mad movement, self-help and mental health consumer advocacy from the 1960s inside a longer tradition of ‘writing madness’. Starting with a brief history of the relevance of first-person accounts, then looking at the significance of other ways of representing the psychiatric ‘patient’, ‘survivor’ or ‘consumer’ over time, this book aims to escape from dominant modes of writing about the asylum.

What separates the sane from the mad? How hard or easy is it to tell them apart? And what if the difference is really between being mad and going mad? In this landmark work Darian Leader undermines common conceptions of madness. Through case studies like that of the apparently 'normal' Harold Shipman, he shows that madness rarely conforms to the images we might expect. By exploring the idea of 'quiet madness' - that psychosis and an uneventful normal life are absolutely compatible - he argues that we must radically revise our understanding of madness. Once we realise that psychosis can be stable and contained, we have valuable tools to help those who have been less fortunate and whose psychosis has already been triggered. 'Fascinating. A formidable grasp of psychiatric history and a storyteller's flair for detail. What Leader does so effectively is to give us a sense of what it might be like to live inside the mind of a psychotic. A humane and timely book.' New Statesman 'Superb insights, brilliant.' Observer 'Leader's insights could have radical consequences for the way we regard madness.' Daily Telegraph 'Witty, probing. A myth-busting diagnosis of the method in our madness.' Independent 'Provides valuable insights into how psychiatry can help those who have suffered psychosis to rebuild their lives.' Sunday Times

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Updated with a new afterword "An excellent take on the lunacy affecting much of the world today. Douglas is one of the bright lights that could lead us out of the darkness." – Joe Rogan "Douglas Murray fights the good fight for freedom of speech ... A truthful look at today's most divisive issues" – Jordan B. Peterson Are we living through the great derangement of our times? In The Madness of Crowds Douglas Murray investigates the dangers of 'woke' culture and the rise of identity politics. In lively, razor-sharp prose he examines the most controversial issues of our moment: sexuality, gender, technology and race, with interludes on the Marxist foundations of 'wokeness', the impact of tech and how, in an increasingly online culture, we must relearn the ability to forgive. One of the few writers who dares to counter the prevailing view and question the dramatic changes in our society – from gender reassignment for children to the impact of transgender rights on women – Murray's penetrating book, now published with a new afterword taking account of the book's reception and responding to the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests, clears a path of sanity through the fog of our modern predicament.

The philosophy of psychosis and the psychosis of philosophy: a philosopher draws on his experience of madness. In this book, philosopher and linguist Wouter Kusters examines the philosophy of psychosis—and the psychosis of philosophy. By analyzing the experience of psychosis in philosophical terms, Kusters not only emancipates the experience of the psychotic from medical classification, he also emancipates the philosopher from the narrowness of textbooks and academia, allowing philosophers to engage in real-life praxis, philosophy in vivo. Philosophy and madness—Kusters's preferred, non-medicalized term—coexist, one mirroring the other. Kusters draws on his own experience of madness—two episodes of psychosis, twenty years apart—as well as other first-person narratives of psychosis. Speculating about the maddening effect of certain words and thought, he argues, and demonstrates, that the steady flow of philosophical deliberation may sweep one into a full-blown acute psychotic episode. Indeed, a certain kind of philosophizing may result in confusion, paradoxes, unworldly insights, and circular frozenness reminiscent of madness. Psychosis presents itself to the psychotic as an inescapable truth and reality. Kusters evokes the mad person's philosophical or existential amazement at reality, thinking, time, and space, drawing on classic autobiographical accounts of psychoses by Antonin Artaud, Daniel Schreber, and others, as well as the work of phenomenological psychiatrists and psychologists and such phenomenologists as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He considers the philosophical mystic and the mystical philosopher, tracing the mad undercurrent in the Husserlian philosophy of time; visits the cloud castles of mystical madness, encountering LSD devotees, philosophers, theologians, and nihilists; and, falling to earth, finds anxiety, emptiness, delusions, and hallucinations. Madness and philosophy proceed and converge toward a single vanishing point.

This is THE book on anger, the first book to explain exactly why we get mad, what anger really is - and how to cope with and use it. Often confused with hostility and violence, anger is fundamentally different from these aggressive behaviours and in fact can be a healthy and powerful force in our lives. What is anger? Who is allowed to be angry? How can we manage our anger? How can we use it? It might seem like a day doesn't go by without some troubling explosion of anger, whether we're shouting at the kids, or the TV, or the driver ahead who's slowing us down. In this book, the first of its kind, Dr. Ryan Martin draws on 20 years plus of research, as well as his own childhood experience of an angry parent, to take an all-round view on this often-challenging emotion. It explains exactly what anger is, why we get angry, how our anger hurts us as well as those around us, and how we can manage our anger and even channel it into positive change. It also explores how race and gender shape society's perceptions of who is allowed to get angry. Dr. Martin offers questionnaires, emotion logs, control techniques and many other tools to help readers understand better what pushes their buttons and what to do with angry feelings when they arise. It shows how to differentiate good anger from bad anger, and reframe anger from being a necessarily problematic experience in our lives to being a fuel that energizes us to solve problems, release our creativity and confront injustice.

In Black Madness :: Mad Blackness Therí Alyce Pickens rethinks the relationship between Blackness and disability, unsettling the common theorization that they are mutually constitutive. Pickens shows how Black speculative and science fiction authors such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tananarive Due craft new worlds that reimagine the intersection of Blackness and madness. These creative writer-theorists formulate new parameters for thinking through Blackness and madness. Pickens considers Butler's Fledgling as an archive of Black madness that demonstrates how race and ability shape subjectivity while constructing the building blocks for antiracist and anti-ableist futures. She examines how Hopkinson's Midnight Robber theorizes mad Blackness and how Due's African Immortals series contests dominant definitions of the human. The theorizations of race and disability that emerge from these works, Pickens demonstrates, challenge the paradigms of subjectivity that white supremacy and ableism enforce, thereby pointing to the potential for new forms of radical politics.

Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 - from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the "insane" and the rest of humanity.

A powerful work of non-fiction and the natural sequel to The Shock of the Fall.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A deeply powerful memoir about bipolar illness that has both transformed and saved lives—with a new preface by the author. Dr. Jamison is one of the foremost authorities on manic-depressive (bipolar) illness; she has also experienced it firsthand. For even while she was pursuing her career in academic medicine, Jamison found herself succumbing to the same exhilarating highs and catastrophic depressions that afflicted many of her patients, as her disorder launched her into ruinous spending sprees, episodes of violence, and an attempted suicide. Here Jamison examines bipolar illness from the dual perspectives of the healer and the healed, revealing both its terrors and the cruel allure that at times prompted her to resist taking medication.

Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Mystery Mindy McGinnis, the acclaimed author of Not a Drop to Drink and In a Handful of Dust, combines murder, madness, and mystery in a beautifully twisted gothic historical thriller perfect for fans of novels such as Asylum and The Diviners as well as television's True Detective and American Horror Story. Grace Mae is already familiar with madness when family secrets and the bulge in her belly send her to an insane asylum—but it is in the darkness that she finds a new lease on life. When a visiting doctor interested in criminal psychology recognizes Grace's brilliant mind beneath her rage, he recruits her as his assistant. Continuing to operate under the cloak of madness at crime scenes allows her to gather clues from bystanders who believe her less than human. Now comfortable in an ethical asylum, Grace finds friends—and hope. But gruesome nights bring Grace and the doctor into the circle of a killer who will bring her shaky sanity and the demons in her past dangerously close to the surface.