Diane Miller Sommerville
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469643304
- eISBN:
- 9781469643588
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469643304.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
Women on the Confederate homefront, living in a war zone, suffered psychologically. Socialized to believe in doctrines of paternalism, many women were ill-equipped and unaccustomed to new wartime ...
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Women on the Confederate homefront, living in a war zone, suffered psychologically. Socialized to believe in doctrines of paternalism, many women were ill-equipped and unaccustomed to new wartime roles household head that the absence of men required of them. Many southern white women found the added demands of war unbearable and too demanding, leading some to succumb to mental illness that sometimes led to institutionalization in insane asylums, and suicidal ideation or behavior. The most vulnerable women on the homefront were young mothers and widows who bore the heaviest burdens when their husbands were gone leaving them to care for families under trying circumstances. Also contributing to the psychological ailments of Confederate women were worries about male relatives on the battle front, fear of invading armies, scarcity, financial duress, deaths of loved ones, and management of slave labor. The war also exacerbated conditions of women with postpartum disorders rendering them vulnerable to institutionalization or suicidal behavior. The chapter also compares women’s suicidal activity to mens’ and concludes that women more actively thought and talked about ending their lives than men, with relatively few ending their lives, whereas the suicidal behavior of men was more often lethal when compared to women.Less
Women on the Confederate homefront, living in a war zone, suffered psychologically. Socialized to believe in doctrines of paternalism, many women were ill-equipped and unaccustomed to new wartime roles household head that the absence of men required of them. Many southern white women found the added demands of war unbearable and too demanding, leading some to succumb to mental illness that sometimes led to institutionalization in insane asylums, and suicidal ideation or behavior. The most vulnerable women on the homefront were young mothers and widows who bore the heaviest burdens when their husbands were gone leaving them to care for families under trying circumstances. Also contributing to the psychological ailments of Confederate women were worries about male relatives on the battle front, fear of invading armies, scarcity, financial duress, deaths of loved ones, and management of slave labor. The war also exacerbated conditions of women with postpartum disorders rendering them vulnerable to institutionalization or suicidal behavior. The chapter also compares women’s suicidal activity to mens’ and concludes that women more actively thought and talked about ending their lives than men, with relatively few ending their lives, whereas the suicidal behavior of men was more often lethal when compared to women.
Diane Miller Sommerville
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469643304
- eISBN:
- 9781469643588
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469643304.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
Examines the psychological impact of the Civil War on Confederate soldiers who suffered debilitating psychological and emotional wounds that sometimes resulted in institutionalization in insane ...
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Examines the psychological impact of the Civil War on Confederate soldiers who suffered debilitating psychological and emotional wounds that sometimes resulted in institutionalization in insane asylums, or in suicidal behavior. Historians have not focused on Civil War participants as victims of war trauma until recently. This chapter deepens our understanding of these experiences by asserting that external war-related pressures like witnessing death and mayhem combined with internal pressures like fear of masculine failure or being called a coward heavily taxed soldiers and their psyches. Factors that contributed to psychological distress among Confederate servicemen include: exposure to battle, fear of being called a coward, fear of failure, youthfulness, homesickness, and depression.Suicide offered southern white men a way to maintain mastery and control over their deaths in war zones where chaos and disorder prevailed. Attitudes toward Confederates who killed themselves during the war were more supportive and less stigmatizing than one might think. Many soldiers also ended up institutionalized in asylums after being diagnosed as insane. Caregivers and family members rarely connected signs of mental distress with wartime experiences.Less
Examines the psychological impact of the Civil War on Confederate soldiers who suffered debilitating psychological and emotional wounds that sometimes resulted in institutionalization in insane asylums, or in suicidal behavior. Historians have not focused on Civil War participants as victims of war trauma until recently. This chapter deepens our understanding of these experiences by asserting that external war-related pressures like witnessing death and mayhem combined with internal pressures like fear of masculine failure or being called a coward heavily taxed soldiers and their psyches. Factors that contributed to psychological distress among Confederate servicemen include: exposure to battle, fear of being called a coward, fear of failure, youthfulness, homesickness, and depression.Suicide offered southern white men a way to maintain mastery and control over their deaths in war zones where chaos and disorder prevailed. Attitudes toward Confederates who killed themselves during the war were more supportive and less stigmatizing than one might think. Many soldiers also ended up institutionalized in asylums after being diagnosed as insane. Caregivers and family members rarely connected signs of mental distress with wartime experiences.
Kathryn A. Sloan
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520290310
- eISBN:
- 9780520964532
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520290310.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
Chapter 4 examines medical and forensic approaches to self-murder. Some Mexican scientists believed the causes of self-murder to be biological and environmental. Others followed Emile Durkheim's ...
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Chapter 4 examines medical and forensic approaches to self-murder. Some Mexican scientists believed the causes of self-murder to be biological and environmental. Others followed Emile Durkheim's arguments and placed its roots squarely in the urban environment. The environment was the modern city—, its rapid work paces, its changing technology, and the increasing alienation of the individual from family, community, and religion. Newspapers advertised a myriad of tonics and medicines to cure neurasthenia and other causes of excessive nervousness. Class and gender played significant parts in the interpretation and judgments of suicides, and these narratives were acted out in the media and in, judicial, and medical discourse. The documentary base of this chapter includes contemporary the journals ofmedical schools journals, insane asylumthe intake questionnaires of insane asylums, case files of patients incarcerated in the asylums, and forensic-medicine publications.Less
Chapter 4 examines medical and forensic approaches to self-murder. Some Mexican scientists believed the causes of self-murder to be biological and environmental. Others followed Emile Durkheim's arguments and placed its roots squarely in the urban environment. The environment was the modern city—, its rapid work paces, its changing technology, and the increasing alienation of the individual from family, community, and religion. Newspapers advertised a myriad of tonics and medicines to cure neurasthenia and other causes of excessive nervousness. Class and gender played significant parts in the interpretation and judgments of suicides, and these narratives were acted out in the media and in, judicial, and medical discourse. The documentary base of this chapter includes contemporary the journals ofmedical schools journals, insane asylumthe intake questionnaires of insane asylums, case files of patients incarcerated in the asylums, and forensic-medicine publications.
Ann Goldberg
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- November 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780195125818
- eISBN:
- 9780197561348
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780195125818.003.0005
- Subject:
- Clinical Medicine and Allied Health, History of Medicine
Eberbach’s founding in 1815 coincided with the lunacy reform movement that swept Europe and North America in the first half of the century. That movement in Germany took peculiar shape in the ...
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Eberbach’s founding in 1815 coincided with the lunacy reform movement that swept Europe and North America in the first half of the century. That movement in Germany took peculiar shape in the central role played from the start by the state. Unlike England and France, the primary initiative for the lunacy reforms in Germany came from above, by enlightened state bureaucrats under the tutelage of the German neoabsolutist states. If the (apocryphal) founding image of French psychiatry is the alienist Phillip Pinel famously striking the chains off the inmates of the Bicêtre during the French Revolution, its (real) German counterpart is that of the Prussian Minister Karl August von Hardenburg charging J. G. Langermann (medical officer, later privy councillor and head of Prussian medical affairs) in 1803 with the responsibility of turning the Bayreuth madhouse into Germany’s first mental hospital. Other states and areas of Germany followed suit in the decades after the Napoleonic wars. Eberbach was no exception to the German pattern, where new, enlightened ideas about insanity, concerns of state security with respect to the deviant poor, and the desire to keep abreast of the most progressive trends united to lead even the small and impoverished state of Nassau to embark on costly lunacy reforms. Further, in Nassau both the founding and functioning of the asylum were closely tied to state-building, that is, to the consolidation of state power, the political integration of the population, and the extensive administrative reforms that this entailed—in the penal system, medicine, local government, education, religion, and so forth. State reforms in the area of culture (religion and education) will be discussed in chapter 3. The following section focuses on the penal, medical, and (local) governmental reforms, which formed the broader institutional context of the asylum. The duchy of Nassau, which achieved its final form in 1816 (bounded by the Rhine, Main, Sieg, and Lahn rivers), was one of the new Mittelstaaten (medium sized states) to emerge out of the Napoleonic wars and the Congress of Vienna.
Less
Eberbach’s founding in 1815 coincided with the lunacy reform movement that swept Europe and North America in the first half of the century. That movement in Germany took peculiar shape in the central role played from the start by the state. Unlike England and France, the primary initiative for the lunacy reforms in Germany came from above, by enlightened state bureaucrats under the tutelage of the German neoabsolutist states. If the (apocryphal) founding image of French psychiatry is the alienist Phillip Pinel famously striking the chains off the inmates of the Bicêtre during the French Revolution, its (real) German counterpart is that of the Prussian Minister Karl August von Hardenburg charging J. G. Langermann (medical officer, later privy councillor and head of Prussian medical affairs) in 1803 with the responsibility of turning the Bayreuth madhouse into Germany’s first mental hospital. Other states and areas of Germany followed suit in the decades after the Napoleonic wars. Eberbach was no exception to the German pattern, where new, enlightened ideas about insanity, concerns of state security with respect to the deviant poor, and the desire to keep abreast of the most progressive trends united to lead even the small and impoverished state of Nassau to embark on costly lunacy reforms. Further, in Nassau both the founding and functioning of the asylum were closely tied to state-building, that is, to the consolidation of state power, the political integration of the population, and the extensive administrative reforms that this entailed—in the penal system, medicine, local government, education, religion, and so forth. State reforms in the area of culture (religion and education) will be discussed in chapter 3. The following section focuses on the penal, medical, and (local) governmental reforms, which formed the broader institutional context of the asylum. The duchy of Nassau, which achieved its final form in 1816 (bounded by the Rhine, Main, Sieg, and Lahn rivers), was one of the new Mittelstaaten (medium sized states) to emerge out of the Napoleonic wars and the Congress of Vienna.
Elliott Young
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- April 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780190085957
- eISBN:
- 9780190085988
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190085957.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century, Political History
Nathan Cohen, a Russian-Brazilian Jew, was declared insane and deported from the United States in 1914. After being twice refused landing in Brazil and Argentina, Cohen remained trapped on a ship in ...
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Nathan Cohen, a Russian-Brazilian Jew, was declared insane and deported from the United States in 1914. After being twice refused landing in Brazil and Argentina, Cohen remained trapped on a ship in New York’s harbor with no country willing to accept him. Cohen’s well-publicized story reflected Americans’ fear of immigrants and immigrants’ difficulty navigating increasingly restrictive immigration policies. This episode also reveals how psychiatric evaluations were used at the beginning of the twentieth century to identify, detain, and deport supposedly “unfit” and “mentally defective” immigrants. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the mental hospital was by far the carceral institution most likely to hold both immigrants and citizens, and the rate of mental hospital incarceration then is equivalent to the rate in the more recent era of mass incarceration in jails and prisons.Less
Nathan Cohen, a Russian-Brazilian Jew, was declared insane and deported from the United States in 1914. After being twice refused landing in Brazil and Argentina, Cohen remained trapped on a ship in New York’s harbor with no country willing to accept him. Cohen’s well-publicized story reflected Americans’ fear of immigrants and immigrants’ difficulty navigating increasingly restrictive immigration policies. This episode also reveals how psychiatric evaluations were used at the beginning of the twentieth century to identify, detain, and deport supposedly “unfit” and “mentally defective” immigrants. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the mental hospital was by far the carceral institution most likely to hold both immigrants and citizens, and the rate of mental hospital incarceration then is equivalent to the rate in the more recent era of mass incarceration in jails and prisons.
Ann Goldberg
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- November 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780195125818
- eISBN:
- 9780197561348
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780195125818.003.0004
- Subject:
- Clinical Medicine and Allied Health, History of Medicine
In 1838, an indigent tailor arrived at the Eberbach asylum terrified, dazed, and repeatedly crossing himself. At home before his committal, Martin M. had become violent and been bound and beaten. ...
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In 1838, an indigent tailor arrived at the Eberbach asylum terrified, dazed, and repeatedly crossing himself. At home before his committal, Martin M. had become violent and been bound and beaten. He had experienced, as he later explained, “an irresistable urge to spit in people’s faces and hit them.” Now, during his eleven-month incarceration, he incessantly begged for “mercy” from the asylum physicians. Rituals of authority and submission were built-in features of doctor-patient relations in an institution where doctors wielded almost absolute power and where acts of submission were a necessity for any patient who wanted to leave the place. Curiously, Martin M. understood this fact in a language foreign to the medical designs of the asylum—a language (“mercy”) of the prisoner or penitent, of criminal justice or the church, not that of the patient. Martin M., it seems, felt he needed either divine salvation or judicial clemency, not medical treatment. The treatment of Martin M. in an insane asylum was an innovation of the nineteenth century. Just twenty-five years earlier, such a man would have been left at home to face the punishments of family and community or placed in one of the multifunctional work-, poor-, and madhouses that housed the castoffs of society—beggars, petty criminals, prostitutes, orphans, the insane, and the infirm. In contrast to these detention institutions, the new asylums of the nineteenth century contained only the mentally ill, with the aim of medically treating and rehabilitating them through methods that affected the mind. The birth of a new medical specialty and a new set of experts—the alienists, later known as psychiatrists—thus accompanied the founding of modern insane asylums in a movement that spread throughout Europe and North America beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As a result of these changes, masses of deviant and mentally ill people in the nineteenth century came to be incarcerated and subjected to new kinds of medical and psychological treatment (although their numbers remained limited in the first part of the century). We know that most of these people came from the lower classes; certainly such people made up the overwhelming majority of patients in public asylums.
Less
In 1838, an indigent tailor arrived at the Eberbach asylum terrified, dazed, and repeatedly crossing himself. At home before his committal, Martin M. had become violent and been bound and beaten. He had experienced, as he later explained, “an irresistable urge to spit in people’s faces and hit them.” Now, during his eleven-month incarceration, he incessantly begged for “mercy” from the asylum physicians. Rituals of authority and submission were built-in features of doctor-patient relations in an institution where doctors wielded almost absolute power and where acts of submission were a necessity for any patient who wanted to leave the place. Curiously, Martin M. understood this fact in a language foreign to the medical designs of the asylum—a language (“mercy”) of the prisoner or penitent, of criminal justice or the church, not that of the patient. Martin M., it seems, felt he needed either divine salvation or judicial clemency, not medical treatment. The treatment of Martin M. in an insane asylum was an innovation of the nineteenth century. Just twenty-five years earlier, such a man would have been left at home to face the punishments of family and community or placed in one of the multifunctional work-, poor-, and madhouses that housed the castoffs of society—beggars, petty criminals, prostitutes, orphans, the insane, and the infirm. In contrast to these detention institutions, the new asylums of the nineteenth century contained only the mentally ill, with the aim of medically treating and rehabilitating them through methods that affected the mind. The birth of a new medical specialty and a new set of experts—the alienists, later known as psychiatrists—thus accompanied the founding of modern insane asylums in a movement that spread throughout Europe and North America beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As a result of these changes, masses of deviant and mentally ill people in the nineteenth century came to be incarcerated and subjected to new kinds of medical and psychological treatment (although their numbers remained limited in the first part of the century). We know that most of these people came from the lower classes; certainly such people made up the overwhelming majority of patients in public asylums.
Kim E. Nielsen
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780252043147
- eISBN:
- 9780252052026
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252043147.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
Money, Marriage, and Madness is a story of the medical profession, a woman’s wealth and the gendered property laws in which she operated, marital violence, marriage and divorce, institutional ...
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Money, Marriage, and Madness is a story of the medical profession, a woman’s wealth and the gendered property laws in which she operated, marital violence, marriage and divorce, institutional incarceration, and an alleged bank robbery. Dr. Anna B. Miesse Ott lived in a legal context governing money, marriage, and madness that nearly all nineteenth-century women shared. She benefited from wealth, professional status as a physician, and whiteness, but they did not protect her from the vulnerabilities generated by sexism and ableism. After an 1856 marriage and divorce, Ott served for nearly twenty years as a physician in Madison, Wisconsin and garnered additional wealth. In 1873, her husband and local physicians testified to her insanity, as well as her legal incompetency, and Ott entered the gates of the Wisconsin State Hospital for the Insane where she remained until her 1893 death. Her decades of institutionalization reveal daily life in a late nineteenth-century asylum and the permeability of its walls. Tracing the stories told of her after her death enables analyses of the impact of the diagnosis of mania and institutionalization on our memory of her. In addition, this book explores historical methods, ethics, and dilemmas confronted when historical sources are limited and come not from the subject but from those with greater power.Less
Money, Marriage, and Madness is a story of the medical profession, a woman’s wealth and the gendered property laws in which she operated, marital violence, marriage and divorce, institutional incarceration, and an alleged bank robbery. Dr. Anna B. Miesse Ott lived in a legal context governing money, marriage, and madness that nearly all nineteenth-century women shared. She benefited from wealth, professional status as a physician, and whiteness, but they did not protect her from the vulnerabilities generated by sexism and ableism. After an 1856 marriage and divorce, Ott served for nearly twenty years as a physician in Madison, Wisconsin and garnered additional wealth. In 1873, her husband and local physicians testified to her insanity, as well as her legal incompetency, and Ott entered the gates of the Wisconsin State Hospital for the Insane where she remained until her 1893 death. Her decades of institutionalization reveal daily life in a late nineteenth-century asylum and the permeability of its walls. Tracing the stories told of her after her death enables analyses of the impact of the diagnosis of mania and institutionalization on our memory of her. In addition, this book explores historical methods, ethics, and dilemmas confronted when historical sources are limited and come not from the subject but from those with greater power.
Kim E. Nielsen
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780252043147
- eISBN:
- 9780252052026
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252043147.003.0009
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
This chapter analyses the messy impact of historical forces such as ableism, patriarchy, and institutionalization on Ott’s life. The justifying logic imbedded in her diagnosis and prescriptive ...
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This chapter analyses the messy impact of historical forces such as ableism, patriarchy, and institutionalization on Ott’s life. The justifying logic imbedded in her diagnosis and prescriptive institutionalization (re)wrote her life story—her past, her future, and how she would be remembered. The ableism undergirding Ott’s insanity diagnosis permeated legal, familial, and activist contexts both outside and inside the walls of medicine in the late nineteenth-century United States. The chapter then argues for biography as a powerful methodology to forefront lived experiences while simultaneously embedding those lived experiences in large-scale social and historical structures.Less
This chapter analyses the messy impact of historical forces such as ableism, patriarchy, and institutionalization on Ott’s life. The justifying logic imbedded in her diagnosis and prescriptive institutionalization (re)wrote her life story—her past, her future, and how she would be remembered. The ableism undergirding Ott’s insanity diagnosis permeated legal, familial, and activist contexts both outside and inside the walls of medicine in the late nineteenth-century United States. The chapter then argues for biography as a powerful methodology to forefront lived experiences while simultaneously embedding those lived experiences in large-scale social and historical structures.
Paul hurh
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780804791144
- eISBN:
- 9780804794510
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804791144.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This chapter argues that the terror of Moby-Dick dramatizes the logical paradoxes of a meta-dialectical method. It introduces a study of the influence of Melville’s close friend, George Adler, a ...
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This chapter argues that the terror of Moby-Dick dramatizes the logical paradoxes of a meta-dialectical method. It introduces a study of the influence of Melville’s close friend, George Adler, a proponent of Hegelian metaphysics and a chronic paranoiac, upon Moby-Dick. And it shows how the multiple terrors of Moby-Dick do not arise from one or the other philosophical commitment, but rather from a Hegel-inspired application of dialectical method to the problem of dialectical method itself. The chapter analyzes how moments of precarious balance, in Moby-Dick, are paired with an existential and epistemological terror. The chapter concludes with a reading of how Melville models this dialectical terror upon the physical properties of light.Less
This chapter argues that the terror of Moby-Dick dramatizes the logical paradoxes of a meta-dialectical method. It introduces a study of the influence of Melville’s close friend, George Adler, a proponent of Hegelian metaphysics and a chronic paranoiac, upon Moby-Dick. And it shows how the multiple terrors of Moby-Dick do not arise from one or the other philosophical commitment, but rather from a Hegel-inspired application of dialectical method to the problem of dialectical method itself. The chapter analyzes how moments of precarious balance, in Moby-Dick, are paired with an existential and epistemological terror. The chapter concludes with a reading of how Melville models this dialectical terror upon the physical properties of light.
Ann Goldberg
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- November 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780195125818
- eISBN:
- 9780197561348
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780195125818.003.0016
- Subject:
- Clinical Medicine and Allied Health, History of Medicine
Almost unknown before the 1970s, multiple personality disorder (M.P.D.) has become an epidemic in the last twenty years. One estimate puts the incidence of new cases between 1985 and 1995 at forty ...
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Almost unknown before the 1970s, multiple personality disorder (M.P.D.) has become an epidemic in the last twenty years. One estimate puts the incidence of new cases between 1985 and 1995 at forty thousand. The patients are overwhelmingly “white, female, and North American.” The New Yorker tells of one such case: Elizabeth Carlson, a suburban housewife, who began psychiatric treatment in 1989 for depression. Within a year she had discovered more than two dozen personalities inhabiting her mind and had recovered horrifying memories of childhood sexual molestation at the hands of a satanic ritual cult. The psychiatrist, Diane Humenansky, had supplied her patient with a M.P.D. illness script— books, videotapes, and leading questions— which Carlson faithfully internalized and made her own. It was a dangerous script. Before long, Carlson’s condition was deteriorating: she no longer left her bedroom and her marriage was falling apart; she became suicidal, and felt she was going crazy. M.P.D. is not a disease entity. Not the tools of the psychiatrist, but those of the historian, social psychologist, and sociologist are best suited to explain its epidemiology and symptomatology. The illness script Humenansky and other psychiatrists made believable to their patients drew from a number of political, social, and cultural currents: the child-protection movement of the 1970s, the later recovered-memory movement, and the involvement of an unlikely alliance of feminists and Christian fundamentalists. M.P.D. became a psychiatric growth industry, which promoted the illness from new institutional bases: a professional organization (I.S.S.M.P.&D.: International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation), annual conferences, specialized units within hospitals, and publications. Finally, the media spread the word through magazine, talk show, and news coverage (one program featuring a “star [M.P.D.] patient who switched personalities [on cue] for the camera”). On the other hand, it is not accurate to make M.P.D. alone responsible for mental disorder in these women and the medicalization of otherwise purely social problems. Like Carlson, most of these women had long been troubled in mind and “already spent [on average] seven years in the mental—health system” before undergoing M.P.D. therapy.
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Almost unknown before the 1970s, multiple personality disorder (M.P.D.) has become an epidemic in the last twenty years. One estimate puts the incidence of new cases between 1985 and 1995 at forty thousand. The patients are overwhelmingly “white, female, and North American.” The New Yorker tells of one such case: Elizabeth Carlson, a suburban housewife, who began psychiatric treatment in 1989 for depression. Within a year she had discovered more than two dozen personalities inhabiting her mind and had recovered horrifying memories of childhood sexual molestation at the hands of a satanic ritual cult. The psychiatrist, Diane Humenansky, had supplied her patient with a M.P.D. illness script— books, videotapes, and leading questions— which Carlson faithfully internalized and made her own. It was a dangerous script. Before long, Carlson’s condition was deteriorating: she no longer left her bedroom and her marriage was falling apart; she became suicidal, and felt she was going crazy. M.P.D. is not a disease entity. Not the tools of the psychiatrist, but those of the historian, social psychologist, and sociologist are best suited to explain its epidemiology and symptomatology. The illness script Humenansky and other psychiatrists made believable to their patients drew from a number of political, social, and cultural currents: the child-protection movement of the 1970s, the later recovered-memory movement, and the involvement of an unlikely alliance of feminists and Christian fundamentalists. M.P.D. became a psychiatric growth industry, which promoted the illness from new institutional bases: a professional organization (I.S.S.M.P.&D.: International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation), annual conferences, specialized units within hospitals, and publications. Finally, the media spread the word through magazine, talk show, and news coverage (one program featuring a “star [M.P.D.] patient who switched personalities [on cue] for the camera”). On the other hand, it is not accurate to make M.P.D. alone responsible for mental disorder in these women and the medicalization of otherwise purely social problems. Like Carlson, most of these women had long been troubled in mind and “already spent [on average] seven years in the mental—health system” before undergoing M.P.D. therapy.
Eric Jensen
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199737352
- eISBN:
- 9780190268145
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199737352.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
Robert Schumann is one of the most intriguing, and enigmatic, composers of the nineteenth century. Extraordinarily gifted in both music and literature, many of his compositions were inspired by ...
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Robert Schumann is one of the most intriguing, and enigmatic, composers of the nineteenth century. Extraordinarily gifted in both music and literature, many of his compositions were inspired by poetry and novels. For much of his life he was better known as a music critic than as a composer. But whether writing as critic or composer, what he produced was created by him as a reflection of his often turbulent life. Best known was the tempestuous courtship of his future wife, the pianist Clara Wieck. Though marriage and family life seemed to provide a sense of constancy, he increasingly experienced periods of depression and instability. Mounting criticism of his performance as music director at Dusseldorf led to his attempted suicide in 1854. Schumann was voluntarily committed to an insane asylum near Bonn where, despite indications of improvement and dissatisfaction with his treatment, he spent the final two years of his life. Based on original research and newly published letters and journals from the time, the book presents a balanced portrait of the composer. Biographical chapters alternate with discussion of Schumann's piano, chamber, choral, symphonic, and operatic works, demonstrating how the circumstances of his life helped shape the music he wrote. Chronicling the romance of Robert and Clara, the book offers a nuanced look at the evolution of their relationship, one that changed dramatically after marriage. It also follows Schumann's creative musical criticism, which championed the burgeoning careers of Chopin, Liszt, and Brahms and challenged the musical tastes of Europe.Less
Robert Schumann is one of the most intriguing, and enigmatic, composers of the nineteenth century. Extraordinarily gifted in both music and literature, many of his compositions were inspired by poetry and novels. For much of his life he was better known as a music critic than as a composer. But whether writing as critic or composer, what he produced was created by him as a reflection of his often turbulent life. Best known was the tempestuous courtship of his future wife, the pianist Clara Wieck. Though marriage and family life seemed to provide a sense of constancy, he increasingly experienced periods of depression and instability. Mounting criticism of his performance as music director at Dusseldorf led to his attempted suicide in 1854. Schumann was voluntarily committed to an insane asylum near Bonn where, despite indications of improvement and dissatisfaction with his treatment, he spent the final two years of his life. Based on original research and newly published letters and journals from the time, the book presents a balanced portrait of the composer. Biographical chapters alternate with discussion of Schumann's piano, chamber, choral, symphonic, and operatic works, demonstrating how the circumstances of his life helped shape the music he wrote. Chronicling the romance of Robert and Clara, the book offers a nuanced look at the evolution of their relationship, one that changed dramatically after marriage. It also follows Schumann's creative musical criticism, which championed the burgeoning careers of Chopin, Liszt, and Brahms and challenged the musical tastes of Europe.