It took me a long time to read this book. But I found the topic important enough to finish it. Luckily, the writing style of the author is not heayy. She has an easy pen. The author wants to give an overview of the history of women's mentall illness in different countries, starting from 1796 onwards. Next to it she wants tot describe important scientists who developed treats and cures and built mental hospitals. Also she describes cases of well known artists who struggled with mental illness. And how society through the ages labeled madness in different terms. And of course the overall influence of the theory of Freud. She has no systematical or methodological approach which makes that the study feels like a water head. And it ends with a complaint about the way the prescription of medicines have taken over the cure by therapeutical talk. Although I know it is all very subjective, I feel sympathy for her points. ( )

Appignanesi chronicles the history of mental illness and women from the time when mental illness first became thought of as something that actually could be treated. At first, hospitals for the mentally ill were nothing more than storage facilities to keep the patient out of the families hair. Gradually, however, doctors came to feel that treatments, from isolation rooms to Freud’s ‘talking cure’ to ECT to all the assorted drugs, old and new. There have always been more female mental patients than male, and they have been treated differently most of the time.

The author intersperses the history of the treatment of mental illness with biographies of both famous patients and therapists, along with some chapters that focus ‘trends’ in mental illness. I say trends for lack of a better word; I speak of the way an illness is discovered and defined and then is what therapists concentrate of – wandering uteri, cold mothering, repressed memories, giving everyone SSRIs. While the material is all interesting, this approach seems scattered and sometimes hard to follow. I had the feeling that the author could have made two books out of this one. One thing is clear: how mental illness in women is perceived and treated is very much dependant on the sociology of their time. At first, they were told to stay away from reading and learning- something male patients of the time were not told. At another time, they received a great deal of talk therapy. Now they are given pills to cure it all, just as the male patients are. ( )

I gave this book a generous three stars and I am very conflicted about how to rate or review this book. Although there were some fascinating case studies discussed in the book - Marilyn Monroe, Zelda Fitzgerald, Mary Lamb, Alice James, Sylvia Plath, Freud & Jung's women - the book's structure (or lack thereof) really bothered me and made for an aimless, disjointed reading experience. I could never really discern a clear thesis or point behind all the information that was being thrown at me, or whether the focus was on doctors, patients, medical treatments, or theories and ideologies. At some point in the last 1/3 of the book, it becomes blatantly clear that the author has an agenda - defending Freudian pyschoanalysis as the optimal treatment method for what we now call "mental illness" and denigrating against the "medicalization" of the mind and behavioralism. There is certainly a case to be made that SSRI's are not a magic bullet, but the author doesn't even seem to be trying for objectivity near the end of the book.

I read Elaine Showalter's The Female Malady earlier in the year, and I had thought this book would be a nice follow-on that covered a slightly more current time period than Showalter's book, which was written in the 1970s. Appignanesi's book has a slightly different focus than Showalter's but for the most part she treads over familiar territory - societies throughout history have discerned and labelled mental illness in women on the basis of then-contemporary ideas of appropriate and inappropriate roles, behaviors, and aspirations for women; the emergence of a new type of mental illness in a specific time and place reflects the social and political anxieties of that time and place, rather than anything that "is". Representations of mental illness (Showalter discusses literary representations, Appignanesi focuses on the DSM and internet support sites) in popular culture provide a guide (Showalter claims doctors often diagnosed and posed their patients in conformity with literary representations of madness, Appignanesi argues that patients themselves consciously or unconsciously "ape" the symptoms of a disease they have read about). This book really didn't go beyond Showalter analytically and even ends on almost exactly the same note as Showalter's book, however, the ending comes off considerably weaker (because we've read these words before and we know now what Showalter didn't when she finished her book - that the increased entry of women into the mental health field has not really changed the balance of power between women and the medical establishment in most ways). Read Showalter instead. Or Foucault. ( )

This well researched and wide-ranging book
examines the history of the ways in which
women’s minds have been viewed and treated
by medical professionals. Lisa Appignanesi tells
the story of women’s madness, badness and
sadness and how mind doctors have understood
these states of mind over the past two hundred
years. Appignanesi was compelled to delve into
the history of mental disorders in women by
the startling recent statistics of the prevalence
of mental illness in women and also the surge
in treatments that are said to cure madness,
such as antidepressants. The author focuses on
women as they are more likely to be diagnosed
as mentally ill than men, and also because there
has been a strong focus on madness in women
through feminist theoretical history. Appignanesi
also aimed to examine whether the growing
number of women who are now mental health
professionals has helped change the ways in
which women are treated by the mental health
industry. The section of the book that focuses on
the present ways in which madness, badness
and sadness are conceptualised in women is
particularly useful, with the author providing
an insightful section on how abuse impacts
women’s mental health.

Reviewed here.