RECOMMENDED: Lisa Appignanesi publication / 2008

Mad, Bad and Sad: The History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present - Lisa Appignanesi

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 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.

London: Virago Press, 2008 Pp. 540.

Lisa Appignanesi, Poland, France and Canada. A novelist and writer, she is visiting professor of Literature and the Medical Humanities at King's College London. She was chair of the Freud Museum from 2008-2014 and is a former president of English PEN.