Stalking Irish Madness

Author: Patrick Tracey
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0553905597
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
In this powerful, sometimes harrowing, deeply felt story, Patrick Tracey journeys to Ireland to track the origin and solve the mystery of his Irish-American family's multigenerational struggle with schizophrenia. For most Irish Americans, a trip to Ireland is often an occasion to revisit their family's roots. But for Patrick Tracey, the lure of his ancestral home is a much more powerful need: part pilgrimage, part investigation to confront the genealogical mystery of schizophrenia–a disease that had claimed a great-great-great-grandmother, a grandmother, an uncle, and, most recently, two sisters. As long as Tracey could remember, schizophrenia ran on his mother's side, seldom spoken of outright but impossible to ignore. Devastated by the emotional toll the disease had already taken on his family, terrified of passing it on to any children he might have, and inspired by the recent discovery of the first genetic link to schizophrenia, Tracey followed his genealogical trail from Boston to Ireland's county Roscommon, home of his oldest-known schizophrenic ancestor. In a renovated camper, Tracey crossed the Emerald Isle to investigate the country that, until the 1960s, had the world's highest rate of institutionalization for mental illness, following clues and separating fact from fiction in the legendary relationship the Irish have had with madness. Tracey's path leads from fairy mounds and ancient caverns still shrouded in superstition to old pubs whose colorful inhabitants are a treasure trove of local lore. He visits the massive and grim asylum where his famine starved ancestors may have lived. And he interviews the Irish research team that first cracked the schizophrenic code to learn how much–and how little–we know about this often misunderstood disease. Filled with history, science, and lore, Stalking Irish Madness is an unforgettable chronicle of one man's attempt to make sense of his family's past and to find hope for the future of schizophrenic patients. From the Hardcover edition.

The Geography of Madness

Author: Frank Bures
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612193730
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
Why do some men become convinced—despite what doctors tell them—that their penises have, simply, disappeared. Why do people across the world become convinced that they are cursed to die on a particular date—and then do? Why do people in Malaysia suddenly “run amok”? In The Geography of Madness, acclaimed magazine writer Frank Bures investigates these and other “culture-bound” syndromes, tracing each seemingly baffling phenomenon to its source. It’s a fascinating, and at times rollicking, adventure that takes the reader around the world and deep into the oddities of the human psyche. What Bures uncovers along the way is a poignant and stirring story of the persistence of belief, fear, and hope.

Psychiatry and the Business of Madness

Author: B. Burstow
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137503858
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
Based on extensive research, this book is a fundamental critique of psychiatry that examines the foundations of psychiatry, refutes its basic tenets, and traces the workings of the industry through medical research and in-depth interviews.

The Book of Madness and Cures

Author: Regina O'Melveny
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0316195820
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
Dr. Gabriella Mondini, a strong-willed, young Venetian woman, has followed her father in the path of medicine. She possesses a singleminded passion for the art of physick, even though, in 1590, the male-dominated establishment is reluctant to accept a woman doctor. So when her father disappears on a mysterious journey, Gabriella's own status in the Venetian medical society is threatened. Her father has left clues -- beautiful, thoughtful, sometimes torrid, and often enigmatic letters from his travels as he researches his vast encyclopedia, The Book of Diseases. After ten years of missing his kindness, insight, and guidance, Gabriella decides to set off on a quest to find him -- a daunting journey that will take her through great university cities, centers of medicine, and remote villages across Europe. Despite setbacks, wary strangers, and the menaces of the road, the young doctor bravely follows the clues to her lost father, all while taking notes on maladies and treating the ill to supplement her own work. Gorgeous and brilliantly written, and filled with details about science, medicine, food, and madness, The Book of Madness and Cures is an unforgettable debut.

Agnes's Jacket

Author: Gail A. Hornstein
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351535951
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 475

Book Description
In a Victorian-era German asylum, seamstress Agnes Richter painstakingly stitched a mysterious autobiographical text into every inch of the jacket she created from her institutional uniform. Despite every attempt to silence them, hundreds of other psychiatric patients have managed to get their stories out, or to publish them on their own. Today, in a vibrant network of peer-advocacy groups all over the world, those with firsthand experience of emotional distress are working together to unravel the mysteries of madness and to help one another recover. Agnes’s Jacket tells their story, focusing especially on the Hearing Voices Network (HVN), an international collaboration of professionals, people with lived experience, and their families and friends who have been working to develop an alternative approach to coping with voices, visions, and other extreme states that is empowering and useful and does not start from the assumption that such people have a chronic illness. A vast gulf exists between the way medicine explains psychiatric conditions and the experiences of those who suffer. Hornstein’s work helps us to bridge that gulf, guiding us through the inner lives of those diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar illness, depression, and paranoia, and emerging with nothing less than a new model for understanding one another and ourselves.

Making Sense of Madness

Author: Jim Geekie
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0415461952
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 189

Book Description
This book argues that the experience of 'madness' is an integral part of what it is to be human, and that greater focus on subjective experiences can contribute to professional understandings and ways of helping those troubled by these experiences.

In Search of a Prophet

Author: Paul-Gordon Chandler
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538181231
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
“A profound spiritual exploration into the life and work of the beloved poet Kahlil Gibran, a much-needed guide for our times.” –Reza Aslan, author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth In Search of a Prophet is a fascinating journey through the spiritual life of Kahlil Gibran, the great Lebanese-American poet and author of The Prophet, a book originally published in 1923 that has sold over 10 million copies and been translated into dozens of languages. Capturing our imaginations and enriching our spirits, Paul-Gordon Chandler explores this beloved writer and artist, a celebrated mystic who sought to build bridges and tear down walls and who remains a cultural icon among all people of goodwill. This is not a traditional biography but a compelling spiritual journey through Gibran’s writings, art, and the places he lived. From Gibran’s birthplace village high in the snowy mountains of Lebanon, Chandler leads us through his immigration to Boston, art training in Paris, and career in New York, and to the far-reaching places of influence his writings and art have traveled, alerting readers to Gibran’s continuing relevance for today. This paperback edition, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Prophet, includes a foreword by Bishop Michael B. Curry, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, as well as a new preface by the author.

In Search of Soul

Author: Alejandro Nava (Author on hip hop)
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520293541
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
In Search of Soul explores the meaning of “soul” in sacred and profane incarnations, from its biblical origins to its central place in the rich traditions of black and Latin history. Surveying the work of writers, artists, poets, musicians, philosophers and theologians, Alejandro Nava shows how their understandings of the “soul” revolve around narratives of justice, liberation, and spiritual redemption. He contends that biblical traditions and hip-hop emerged out of experiences of dispossession and oppression. Whether born in the ghettos of America or of the Roman Empire, hip-hop and Christianity have endured by giving voice to the persecuted. This book offers a view of soul in living color, as a breathing, suffering, dreaming thing.

In Search of Origins

Author: Garry Trompf
Publisher: Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd
ISBN: 9781932705515
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Book Description
Religion is an integral part of our life. The answer to the question what is religion is subjective. Since the word `religion' and its cognates are common coinage across the literate world, most of us will have a fair appreciation of the term's connotations. Considering students and scholars alike are lacking an introductory textbook on the origins of religion in modern Western theory and archaeological practice, this work is designed to fill the lacuna. Historians of ideas and social science are often not clear as to how any given theory of religion might pertain to the known archaeological record, while exponents of prehistoric religion have worked with surprisingly narrow definitions of religious life. Many will locate the kernel of the matter in `practice' or in an active `spirituality'. Today the pressures of the global village have forced many of us to take off our blinkers and do some cross cultural homework. Religious Studies has emerged as an academic discipline (or intellectual pursuit) with one of its functions being to facilitate mutual understanding between traditions, and to ensure that the varieties of religious belief and experience are fairly appraised. The series, of which this book is a part, will be historically rather than theologically oriented. This book will cover such a vast area for investigation and it is designed to help students find their own way through the forest, pick the trees which interest them and learn how to scrutinise them in depth. Religious Studies is a multi-disciplinary activity and one is encouraged to turn over as many stones as possible to look at religions from as many different angles as possible--the psychological, anthropological, sociological, geographical, ecological, political, economic and the like-with some awareness of current theological debates as well. This book gives scope to the comparative method and all the great religions are treated side-by-side, with points of comparison and contrast drawn. This book begin with the large question of the origins and prehistory of religion, including the bearing anthropological study has on this question, before giving space to the larger traditions themselves. The comparative method is applied not only between such enormous aggregates of phenomena as (let us say) Buddhism and Islam, but between these and small-scale, tribal traditions as well. The book highlights that some religions will be difficult to separate from cultures because they amount to a total way of life. An attempt is made to try to interpret religion both as culture and as a distinctive set of forces in interaction with culture, or perhaps even against prevailing cultural forms. This book has been designed to help students find for themselves possible answers to existential or theological questions, but only as a side-effect to historical and phenomenological study, and as the author says "provide no such answers on a platter."

In Search of Oneness

Author: Moosa Raza
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 8184756720
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Book Description
This free-flowing narrative illuminates the journey of the author, a devout Muslim, through sacred books and holy men of all religions---starting with his own---in search of a personal god and faith, and his coming upon the Bhagavad Gītā. Examining commentaries on this text, from Sankara to Abdur Rahman Chishti, alongside some renderings of the Quran here, Moosa Raza finds many common threads: summoning God through sādhanā or dhikr; reaching God through daan or giving and the service of the destitute; and seeking ecstasy through self-mastery, detachment and surrender. These original observations are complemented by his encounters with people practising these values, like his ailing school teacher who felt God was always behind him or his friend, a senior civil servant, who, trusting in Allah’s providence, kept an open home for the poor and the homeless. Through these experiences and his own striving, Raza celebrates the oneness and power of faith and spirituality, showing a path for other seekers.