Mad Bad and Sad or Adaptogens

Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors

Author: Lisa Appignanesi

A brave and brilliantly researched intellectual history of the relationship between women and mental illness since 1800.

This is the story of how we have understood extreme states of mind over the last two hundred years and how we conceive of them today, from the depression suffered by Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath to the mental anguish and addictions of iconic beauties Zelda Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. From Mary Lamb, sister of Charles, who in the throes of a nervous breakdown turned on her mother with a kitchen knife, to Freud, Jung, and Lacan, who developed the new women-centered therapies, Lisa Appignanesi's research traces how more and more of the inner lives and emotions of women have become a matter for medics and therapists. Here too is the story of how over the years symptoms and diagnoses have developed together to create fashions in illness and how treatments have succeeded or sometimes failed. Mad, Bad, and Sad takes us on a fascinating journey through the fragile, extraordinary human mind. 5 illustrations.

The New York Times - Kathryn Harrison

One of the consistently fascinating and disturbing aspects of Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors is Lisa Appignanesi's assiduous tracking of the modishness of what might be mistaken for a sui generis discipline. Of course, as anyone who has visited a psychiatric hospital—or ridden the subway—can attest, crazy is what we call people who refuse to conform to accepted norms of behavior. And the definition of nonconformity must change in step with styles of conforming…While Mad, Bad and Sad echoes and enlarges upon Elaine Showalter's book The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980, Showalter's perspective is more exclusively feminist, arguing that psychiatry as practiced on women is a history of their subjugation and control by men. But as Appignanesi makes clear, women have had no little role in creating and fulfilling the definitions of their madness.

Publishers Weekly

Award-winning British novelist Appignanesi (The Memory Man) has written a fascinating if somewhat diffuse study of how, over the past two centuries, women's ability to live creative lives has been controlled by culture, and how their unsuccessful attempts to rebel frequently lead to mental illness-itself a slippery, ever-evolving cultural concept. Appignanesi's sources are wide-ranging but largely literary, based upon letters, diaries, articles and fiction from feminist writers such as Betty Friedan, historians like R.D. Laing and Jacque Lacan, psychologists such as Melanie Klein, and troubled subjects like Zelda Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. Beginning with the lives of mentally ill women in the 19th century, Appignanesi moves chronologically through the history of psychology-as ideas like schizophrenia replace earlier notions of hysteria-and its relationship to the creative woman, using in-depth profiles of Virginia Woolf, Alice James and others. Looking at the complex cultural, political and familial circumstances under which mental illness emerges, and their implications for the present (in which depression and eating disorders have become major problems), Appignanesi convincingly asserts that "symptoms and diagnoses... cluster to create cultural fashions in illness and cure," suggesting provocatively that "what is at issue here is not psychic disorder so much as social deterioration of a radical kind."
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Go to: The Leviathan or Power to the People Signed Edition

Adaptogens: Herbs for Strength, Stamina, and Stress Relief

Author: David Winston

The definitive guide to adaptogenic herbs, formerly known as “tonics,” that counter the effects of age and stress on the body

• Reveals how adaptogens increase the body’s resistance to adverse influences

• Provides a history of the use of these herbal remedies and the actions, properties, preparation, and dosage for each herb

We all deal with stress every day, and every day our bodies strive to adapt and stay balanced and healthy. In Adaptogens, authors David Winston and Steven Maimes provide a comprehensive look into adaptogens, non-toxic herbs such as ginseng, eleuthero, and licorice, that produce a defensive response to stress in our bodies. Formerly known as rejuvenating herbs or tonics, adaptogens help the body to “adapt” to the many influences it encounters. They increase stamina and counter the normal effects of aging and thus are becoming important tools in sports medicine and in the prevention and treatment of chronic fatigue and other stress-related disorders.

Winston and Maimes present the historical uses of these herbal remedies in India, Russia, China, and the Americas and explain how they work and why they are so effective at combating stress-induced illness. Monographs for each adaptogen also present the latest scientific research and include the origin, traditional use, actions, properties, preparation, and dosage for each herb.