- Title
- Why Talk About Madness?: Bringing History into the Conversation
- Creator
- Coleborne, Catharine
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21096-0
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Resource Type
- book
- Date
- 2020
- Description
- The history of madness remains one of the most vibrant and controversial fields in the social history of medicine. This short book explains why we should talk more about madness in our present, but also in historical context. Using histories of madness, the book also argues that we need to imagine new ways of thinking about madness. This book is not a general text. Instead, it aims to be a provocation. Why Talk About Madness? argues that the story of the social and cultural impact of the history of the mad movement, self-help and mental health consumer advocacy from the 1960s must be read inside a longer tradition of first-person accounts of madness. The people at the centre of the historical narrative of mental health—those with lived experiences of madness, especially those who have been in institutional ‘care’ and treatment regimes—should be the focus of its histories. Starting with a brief history of the relevance of first-person accounts, and then turning to the significance of other ways of representing the ‘patient’, ‘inmate’ or ‘consumer’ over time, this book argues that the confinement of madness in the asylum produced specific evidence and understandings about mental health that have persisted long after the closure of asylums. It challenges this mode of understanding and presents new thinking about mental illness experiences in historical perspective that could reshape our interpretation of mental health in the present.
- Subject
- madness; mental illness; history; medicine; psychiatry
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1442261
- Identifier
- uon:41637
- Identifier
- ISBN:9783030210960
- Language
- eng
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