Women and Madness

Author: Phyllis Chesler
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 164160039X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 462

Book Description
Feminist icon Phyllis Chesler's pioneering work, Women and Madness, remains startlingly relevant today, nearly fifty years since its first publication in 1972. With over 2.5 million copies sold, this landmark book is unanimously regarded as the definitive work on the subject of women's psychology. Now back in print, this completely revised and updated edition adds perspectives on eating disorders, postpartum depression, biological psychology, important feminist political findings, female genital mutilation, and more.

Women and Madness

Author: Phyllis Chesler
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books
ISBN: 9781641600361
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Front Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- 2005 Introduction -- Madness -- Demeter and Clytemnestra Revisited -- One -- Why Madness? -- Women in Asylums: Four Lives -- Mothers and Daughters: A Mythological Commentary on the Lives -- Heroines and Madness: Joan of Arc and the Virgin Mary -- Two -- Asylums -- The Mental Asylum -- The Female Social Role and Psychiatric Symptoms: Depression, Frigidity, and Suicide -- Schizophrenia in Three Studies -- A Theoretical Proposal -- Three -- The Clinicians -- How Many Clinicians Are There in America? -- Contemporary Clinical Ideology -- Traditional Clinical Ideology -- The Institutional Nature of Private Therapy -- Four -- The Female Career As a Psychiatric Patient -- The Interviews -- Women -- Five -- Sex Between Patient and Therapist -- Six -- Psychiatrically Institutionalized Women -- Seven -- Lesbians -- The Interviews -- Eight -- Third World Women -- The Interviews -- Nine -- Feminists -- The Interviews -- Ten -- Female Psychology: Past, Present, and Future -- Female Psychology in Our Culture: Women Alone -- Female Psychology in Our Culture: Women in Groups -- Amazon Societies: Visions and Possibilities -- The Problem of Survival: Power and Violence -- Some Psychological Prescriptions for the Future -- Thirteen Questions -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Back Cover.

Women and Madness

Author: Phyllis Chesler
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Trade
ISBN: 9781403968975
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Book Description
Feminist icon Chesler's pioneering work--2.5 million copies sold--revised and updated for the first time in 30 years. This definitive book was the first to address critical questions about women and mental health. Combining patient interviews with an analysis of women's roles in history, society, and myth Chesler concludes that there is a terrible double standard when it comes to women's psychology. In this new edition, she addresses head-on many of the most relevant issues to women and mental health today, including eating disorders, social acceptance of antidepressants, addictions, sexuality, postpartum depression, and more. Fully revised and updated, Women and Madness remains as important today as it was when first published in 1972.

Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

Author: Phyllis Chesler
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1569762783
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 577

Book Description
Drawing on the most important studies in psychology, human aggression, anthropology, and primatology, and on hundreds of original interviews conducted over a period of more than 20 years, this groundbreaking treatise urges women to look within and to consider other women realistically, ethically, and kindly and to forge bold and compassionate alliances. Without this necessary next step, women will never be liberated. Detailing how women's aggression may not take the same form as men's, this investigation reveals—through myths, plays, memoir, theories of revolutionary liberation movements, evolution, psychoanalysis, and childhood development—that girls and women are indeed aggressive, often indirectly and mainly toward one another. This fascinating work concludes by showing that women depend upon one another for emotional intimacy and bonding, and exclusionary and sexist behavior enforces female conformity and discourages independence and psychological growth.

The Madness of Women

Author: Jane Professor Ussher
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136656324
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Book Description
Nominated for the 2012 Distinguished Publication Award of the Association for Women in Psychology! Why are women more likely to be positioned or diagnosed as mad than men? If madness is a social construction, a gendered label, as many feminist critics would argue, how can we understand and explain women's prolonged misery and distress? In turn, can we prevent or treat women’s distress, in a non-pathologising women centred way? The Madness of Women addresses these questions through a rigorous exploration of the myths and realities of women's madness. Drawing on academic and clinical experience, including case studies and in-depth interviews, as well as on the now extensive critical literature in the field of mental health, Jane Ussher presents a critical multifactorial analysis of women's madness that both addresses the notion that madness is a myth, and yet acknowledges the reality and multiple causes of women's distress. Topics include: The genealogy of women’s madness – incarceration of difficult or deviant women Regulation through treatment Deconstrucing depression, PMS and borderline personality disorder Madness as a reasonable response to objectification and sexual violence Women’s narratives of resistance This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of psychology, gender studies, sociology, women's studies, cultural studies, counselling and nursing.

Men, Women and Madness

Author: Joan Busfield
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1349246786
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Book Description
This book focuses on the complex patterning of mental disorder identified in men and women. The first part of the book examines the gendered landscape of mental disorder, key concepts and approaches, and the way in which gender is embedded in constructs of mental disorder. The second part considers theories of the causes of mental disorder and the extent to which the different causes can account for the gendered landscape of disorder. It concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of the analysis.

Women, Madness and the Law

Author: Wendy Chan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135311161
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 373

Book Description
This book explores, for the first time in an edited collection, the intersection of three key research areas - women, madness and the law - and advances the debates on how law and the 'psy' sciences play a critical role in regulating and controlling women's lives.

Daughters of Parvati

Author: Sarah Pinto
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812245830
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
In her role as devoted wife, the Hindu goddess Parvati is the divine embodiment of viraha, the agony of separation from one's beloved, a form of love that is also intense suffering. These contradictory emotions reflect the overlapping dissolutions of love, family, and mental health explored by Sarah Pinto in this visceral ethnography. Daughters of Parvati centers on the lives of women in different settings of psychiatric care in northern India, particularly the contrasting environments of a private mental health clinic and a wing of a government hospital. Through an anthropological consideration of modern medicine in a nonwestern setting, Pinto challenges the dominant framework for addressing crises such as long-term involuntary commitment, poor treatment in homes, scarcity of licensed practitioners, heavy use of pharmaceuticals, and the ways psychiatry may reproduce constraining social conditions. Inflected by the author's own experience of separation and single motherhood during her fieldwork, Daughters of Parvati urges us to think about the ways women bear the consequences of the vulnerabilities of love and family in their minds, bodies, and social worlds.

Women, Sex, and Madness

Author: Breanne Fahs
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429874960
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Book Description
Covering a wide variety of subjects and points of inquiry on women's sexuality, from genital anxieties about pubic hair to constructions of the body in the therapy room, this book offers a ground-breaking examination of women, sex, and madness, drawing from psychology, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies. Breanne Fahs argues that women’s sexuality embodies a permanent state of tension between cultural impulses of destruction and selfishness contrasted with the fundamental possibilities of subversiveness and joy. Emphasizing cultural, social, and personal narratives about sexuality, Fahs asks readers to imagine sex, bodies, and madness as intertwined, and to see these narratives as fluid, contested, and changing. With topics as diverse as anarchist visions of sexual freedom, sexualized emotion work, lesbian haunted houses, and the insidious workings of capitalism, Fahs conceptualizes sexuality as a force of regressive moral panics and profound inequalities—deployed in both blatant and more subtle ways onto the body—while also finding hope and resistance in the possibilities of sexuality. By integrating clinical case studies, cultural studies, qualitative interviews, and original essays, Fahs offers a provocative new vision for sexuality that fuses together social anxieties and cultural madness through a critical feminist psychological approach. Fahs provides an original and accessible volume for students and academics in psychology, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies.

Women, Madness and Medicine

Author: Denise Russell
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9780745612614
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
This book looks at the roots of modern psychiatry, its theoretical approach to women, and what shifting trends in diagnosis tell us about its social underpinning. Arguing at both an epistemological and empirical level, Russell challenges the biological base of conditions such as schizophrenia, depression, premenstrual syndrome, anorexia, bulimia and female criminality.