Madness: A Very Short Introduction

Andrew Scull

Very Short Introductions

Provocative, entertaining and authoritative examination of a notorious condition
Wide-ranging account of the Western encounter with madness; incorporating political, social, literary, cultural, artistic, and scientific dimensions
Explores our responses to madness over the centuries
Part of the Very Short Introductions series - over three million copies sold worldwide

Madness: A Very Short Introduction

Andrew Scull

Description

Madness is something that frightens and fascinates us all. It is a word with which we are universally familiar, and a condition that haunts the human imagination. In this Very Short Introduction, Andrew Scull provides a provocative and entertaining examination of the social, cultural, medical, and artistic responses to mental disturbance across more than two millennia, concluding with some observations on the contemporary accounts of mental illness. He shows that through the centuries, in poetry and in prose, in drama and in the visual arts, madness has been on display for all to see. He also describes how a whole industry has grown up, devoted to its management and suppression. Perhaps most important, he conveys how madness profoundly disturbs our common sense assumptions; threatens the social order, both symbolically and practically; creates almost unbearable disruptions in the texture of daily living; and turns our experience and our expectations upside down. Throughout this fascinating history, many fascinating and arresting pictures illuminate the overall portrait of madness in its various contexts.

Madness: A Very Short Introduction

Andrew Scull

Very Short Introductions

Madness: A Very Short Introduction

Andrew Scull

Very Short Introductions

Author Information

Andrew Scull is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is past president of the Society for the Social History of Medicine.

Madness: A Very Short Introduction

Andrew Scull

Very Short Introductions

From Our Blog

The future of an illusion

By Andrew Scull Fights over how to define and diagnose mental illness are scarcely a novel feature of the psychiatric landscape, but their most recent manifestation has some unusual features. For more than a decade now, the American Psychiatric Association has been preparing a new edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the fifth (or by some counts the seventh) edition of that extraordinary tome, each incarnation weightier than the last. Over the past two years, however, major attacks have been launched on the enterprise, replete with allegations that the new edition shows signs of being built on hasty and unscientific foundations

Posted on October 12, 2012

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Madness: A Very Short Introduction

Andrew Scull

Very Short Introductions

Reading Guide

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Questions for Thought and Discussion

Isn't the very word “madness”: an insult, and thus a word best abandoned?
How have religion and madness been connected in history?
What can we learn from literary and pictorial representations of madness?
How did seventeenth and eighteenth century medical theorists connect nerves and mental distress? Why did patients who exhibited milder forms of mental distress find these notions attractive?
Were the private madhouses of the eighteenth century a wholly negative phenomenon?
What are we to make of "moral treatment"?
Why do some people refer to nineteenth century lunatic asylums as "museums of madness"?
In what ways are gender and madness linked? Is it a mistake or entirely appropriate to speak of madness as "the female malady"?
How did the mad come to be thought of as biological degenerates?
What are we to make of the connections between war and mental illness, and the epidemics of "shell shock", "combat exhaustion", "post traumatic stress disorder", "Gulf War syndrome" and the like?
Did the Nazi attempt to exterminate the mentally ill amount to anything more than taking ideas that were equally widespread in Britain, France, and the United States to their logical conclusion?
Why are the mad so vulnerable to therapeutic enthusiasms?
Were lobotomies ever justifiable?
How did psychoanalysis come to be so dominant in the United States after the Second World War, and what explains its rapid demise?
What is meant by the term "refrigerator mother", and why might the spread of theories associated with this term have encouraged patients' families to re-embrace biological accounts of mental illness?
Why do you think Hollywood has exhibited such a persistent fascination with madness as a subject?
Why do some people proclaim that mental illness is a myth? Should we believe them?
What accounts for the crises of legitimacy that periodically confront psychiatry?
How can we account for the abandonment of mental hospitals, and what has replaced them for the gravely mentally ill? Is it legitimate to call this development "a reform"?
What are we to make of the drugs revolution in psychiatry? How has it influenced the psychiatric profession, the experience of being mentally ill, and the views of the general public about madness?

Other books by Andrew Scull

Andrew Scull, Hysteria: The Disturbing History (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011)
Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700-1900, (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005)
Andrew Scull, Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)
Andrew Scull, The Insanity of Place/The Place of Insanity (London and New York: Routledge 2007)
Andrew Scull with Jonathan Andrews, Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth Century England, (Berkeley: University of California Press)
Andrew Scull, Customers and Patrons of the Mad Trade: The Management of Lunacy in Eighteenth Century London, (Berkeley: University of California Press)
Andrew Scull with Nicholas Hervey and Charlotte MacKenzie, Masters of Bedlam: The Transformation of the Mad-Doctoring Trade, (Princeton: Princeton University Press)
Andrew Scull, Social Order/Mental Disorder: Anglo-American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective, (Berkeley: University of California Press.)
Andrew Scull, Decarceration: Community Treatment and the Deviant, (Cambridge: Polity Press)