Who is 'Mad'? Who is Not? And Who Decides?
In this fascinating exploration of mental illness, Professor Brendan
Kelly examines 'madness' in history and how we have responded to it over
the centuries.
We travel from the psychiatric institutions of modern India to
scientific studies of the brain in Victorian England. We discover the
beginnings of formal asylum care and witness the experimental therapies
of the cavernous psychiatric hospitals of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries in Ireland, England, Belgium, Italy, Germany and the
United States.
Covering lobotomy and the Nazis' Aktion T4 campaign, as well as Freud,
psychoanalysis, cognitive behavioural therapy and neuroscience, In
Search of Madness examines the shift in recent times from
'psychobabble' to 'neurobabble'.
This is an all encompassing history of one of the most basic fears to
haunt the human psyche - madness - and it concludes with a passionate
manifesto for change: four proposals to make mental health services more
effective, accessible and just.
