Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors

This brave and brilliantly researched intellectual history chronicles the relationship between women and mental illness since 1800, taking readers on a fascinating journey through the fragile, extraordinary human mind. 5 illustrations.

This fascinating history of mind doctors and their patients probes the ways in which madness, badness, and sadness have been understood over the last two centuries. Lisa Appignanesi charts a story from the days when the mad were considered possessed to our own century when the official psychiatric manual lists some 350 mental disorders. Women play a key role here, both as patients among them Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Marilyn Monroe and as therapists. Controversially, Appignanesi argues that women have significantly changed the nature of mind-doctoring, but in the process they have also inadvertently highlighted new patterns of illness."