I came across an interesting recent book on women and madness by Jane Ussher, a critical health psychologist, the other day. I first became familiar with Jane Ussher’s work when I was doing my PhD on the construction of adolescent depression as a socio-cultural phenomenon back in the 1990s and I found a book of hers I read then with the title Women’s madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness? (Amherst, MA, US: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991) very insightful.
Ussher’s recent book I am referring to here is The Madness of Women: Myth and Experience (Oxon: Routledge, 2011); in this book, among others, there are extensive references to women’s sexual and reproductive health and its interface with mental health/’mental illness’ from a historical perspective.
Albertine, one of Jean-Martin Charcot’s patients, demonstrating the stages of a hysterical attack, 1891 (Wellcome Library, London)
(www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/themes/menalhealthandillness/womanandpsychiatry.aspx)
You can read a review of The Madness of Women: Myth and Experience that Matthew Connolly from Manchester Metropolitan University wrote for the British Psychological Society Psychology of Women Section here
Dr Ginger ,
I HATE when women get dismissed, and called crazy. Men still get away with so much more. STILL!!!!!!!!!!