Gender and insanity
Some months ago I posted about my immediate reaction to the concept of Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 by Lisa Appignanesi. A few weeks ago I dispatched an essay review of same to A Specialist Journal.
Writing that essay was the underlying reason for my solicitation of instances of Mad Male Writers & Artists - who ended up being a couple of sentences in a paragraph more generally about why there has been no gendered analysis of Men and Insanity when there seems to be an awful lot about Mad Wymmynz.
I'm not going to post the whole essay here - it's geared to a fairly specialist audience and is longer than I like to inflict, Dear Readers, upon you: however, it occurred to me that it might of interest to pass on a few of the points in a brief and synoptic fashion.
I found it a bit problematic that it was trying to be BOTH a history of the development of psychiatry (in UK, Europe and N America, or at least, dodging about between them) AND writing this through an examination of how psychiatry has engaged with women and women with psychiatry.
I liked that it was getting well past the Showalterian Eeeeeevul Patriarchal Psychiatrists They B Oppressin Teh Wimminz, and looking at things like women colluding with psychiatrists or using them in various ways, seeking out treatment, and entering the profession themselves; and was just much more nuanced about the stories.
However: MI USUAL SUSPECTZ, LET ME SHOW U THEM. A few fresher faces, but mostly the standard roster of crazy ladies.
Crazy ladies who were, however, I very much suspect, most of them not exactly typical of women who were committed to psychiatric care c. 1800-2000. Most of the latter were not, not, not V Woolf, S Plath, A James, Z Fitzgerald, M Monroe, etc etc etc.
This was probably partly due to another thing I found problematic about the book, which was that it's not even secondary literature, it's tertiary. Apart from one example taken from unpublished case notes (and we don't know why or how these came to the author's attention, since one does not get the impression - and I would have a certain amount of inside knowledge on this! - of someone who has done major delving in archival repositories), everything is based on Some Other Person's Work on the subject (and there are some rather dodgy gaps in the bibliography, too).
Based on those it produces a version of what seems to me an over-simplified smoothed-out narrative of the development of psychiatry over the period in question and makes some assertions that are just plain wrong. (How can you write a book on this subject and not only never mention The After Care Association for Poor and Friendless Female Convalescents on Leaving Asylums for the Insane, f.1879, but assume that halfway houses were a product of the 1960s?)
It's readable. It covers a lot of ground, possibly a bit too confusingly much.
I think I would like it better if I didn't think an awful lot of people are going to take it as The Full Real Story, Last Word on the subject. Because it is a readable popular work on the subject and yet has what looks like srs scholarly apparatus. So I imagine people are going to take it seriously rather than considering it critically or using it as a starting place for thinking about the subject.
I've noticed in reviews of my own works that people picked up on stuff that I didn't think is particularly new or fresh, but the reviewer had Never Heard of X Before so went on about it. I guess there's a lot of that around. (As opposed to those of us who could almost do Famous Insane Females as a Mastermind special subject.)