The Stigma of Madness Essay

He differentiates between madness as a clinical condition and a mystical madness. He further supports his argument with Elie Wiesel distinctions of the two. Clinical madman isolates himself from the world while mystical madman brings the Messiah in him (112). Patterson further discusses the notion of madness before the creation of human and

When we first got this stimulus, everyone focused on the common idea of madness as an illness and based at mental institutions, as madness is socially constructed and everyone differs to different people, we decided not to follow that path as there are many people who doesn’t fit the set meaning of insane but are still regarded as insane and this also made us question ‘who is insane/sane?’.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” has received wide praise for its accurate depiction of madness and the symptoms attributed to mental breakdowns (Shumaker 1985).   While these symptoms may seem obvious from today’s psychological perspective, Gilman was writing at the close of the 19th century when the discipline of psychology was still emerging out of a rudimentary psychiatric approach to treating the mentally ill. Though doctors have attempted to write about the treatment of insanity since ancient Greece, the history of madness has most often been characterized by a series of popular images, images that may have stunted the

Even though asylum classifications stayed moderately constant for a century, there was a development in the thinking about insanity. One of Pinel’s scholar proposed the idea that there could be a distinct mood faculty in a category of its own in the 1830’s. Jean-Dominique Etienne Esquirol, who explained a deep sadness, lypemanie as a distinct disorder. The fact that mania or insanity could create shifting manifestations had presented little difficulty, however, they had problems with the fact that two clinical states being so different could be caused by the same underlying disease state. In order to overcome these conceptual problems, Falret and Baillarger proposed a disorder that had changing cycles of mania and melancholia of certain length

In early American history, individuals with mental illnesses have been neglected and suffered inhuman treatments. Some were beaten, lobotomized, sterilized, restrained, in addition to other kinds of abuse. Mental illness was thought to be the cause of supernatural dreadful curse from the Gods or a demonic possession. Trepanning (the opening of the skull) is the earliest known treatment for individuals with mental illness. This practice was believed to release evil spirits (Kemp, 2007). Laws were passed giving power to take custody over the mentally ill including selling their possessions and properties and be imprisoned (Kofman, 2012). The first psychiatric hospital in the U.S. was the Pennsylvania Hospital where mentally ill patients were left in cold basements because they were considered not affected by cold or hot environments and restraint with iron shackles. They were put on display like zoo animals to the public for sell by the doctors (Kofmen, 2012). These individuals were punished and isolated and kept far out of the eyes of society, hidden as if they did not exist. They were either maintained by living with their families and considered a source of embarrassment or institutionalized

Hippocrates was the first to recognize that mental illness was due to ‘disturbed physiology’ as opposed to ‘displeasure of the gods or evidence of demonic possession’. It was not until about one thousand years later that the first place designated for the mentally ill came to be in 15th century Spain. Before the 15th century, it was largely up to individual’s families to care for them. By the 17th century, society was ‘often housing them with handicapped people, vagrants, and delinquents. Those considered insane are increasingly treated inhumanely, often chained to walls and kept in dungeons’. There are great strides for the medical treatments for the mentally

Through the Middle Ages and until the establishment of asylums, treatments for mental illness were offered by “humanistic physicians, medical astrologers, apothecaries, and folk or traditional healers” (MacDonald 175). Aside from secular exorcisms, prayers, charms, amulets, and other mystical treatments were available. Sedatives during the 17th century consisted of opium grains to “ease the torment” of mental illness (MacDonald 190).

Insanity is developed around through the story of “Night.” People were becoming crazy when they fighted for the food , loosing faith to God and nocturnal silence.

Starkey's "hysterical bobbysoxers" diagnosis has entered the popular canon and school textbooks, while Hansen's verdict of "hysterical in the scientific sense of that term” has been accepted as true by the majority of scholars, Demos, McMillen, and even Karlsen, who treat the cause of affliction as settled and go on to other projects. While I see the cause as not settled, I will look instead at the way the same descriptions of affect have produced such mutually exclusive interpretations -- fraud and illness -- and suggest why fraud went entirely out of fashion, after being accepted for over a century, while hysteria came into fashion oddly, only Upham allows a mixture of fraud and illness. I will suggest that these shifts in interpretation are not founded on any new knowledge or new theories of psychology, but grow out of changes in cultural and ideological attitudes, especially toward women, and that they are made possible by the ambiguities of historical documents, by inadequate analyses of the explanations that were available in 1692, and occasionally by poor reasoning on the part of the historians.

An individual can psyche himself or herself on believing that a prescribed drug given from pharmaceutical doctors are making them feel better. Madness in today’s world can be covered up by those medications, unless everyone is brainwashed in believing that it can. In present society, medicine given to people to “treat” them for certain mental illnesses is normal to see. In the nineteenth century, people who suffered from mental madness had to deal with the insanity, such as depression or hearing voices, without any help. They had to go through the pain, while everyone else watched them, and those who had no problems judged them. In the past, a person was looked down on if someone else noticed problems with that individual. This created many people to try and hide their madness, so others would think they were normal. Those who believed they were safe from this psychological illness had not received any detrimental problem in their life to unleash it. Erik Larson’s novel, The Devil in the White City, foreshadows the characteristic of madness in many of the characters. Larson reveals in his novel that it does not matter what type of individual you are because everyone has some sort of madness inside of her or him, waiting to be revealed.

Madness can be defined as “mental delusion or the eccentric behavior arising from it,” but Emily Dickinson says, “Much madness is Divinest Sense, to a discerning Eye.” Dickinson was referring to the fact that madness is seen differently in everyone’s eyes. Society labels people “mad” based on the fact that a person doesn't conform to the values of everyone else in the world. Individualism is frowned upon in the world we live in. In the novel, One who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, R.P. McMurphy did not care how he was judged, he just wanted to make a difference in the lives of the other patients on the ward. From the very beginning, you could tell that McMurphy was different. To people like Nurse Ratched and the orderlies, his

The first half of the nineteenth century in England saw a spectacular rise in the proportion of the population officially recognized as insane.

Mental illness and deviance fit together like a puzzle. Many times if someone commits a crime or does something so insanely crazy, people are quick to say “Well, they were mentally ill”. Although, that is not always the case, a lot of the time it is. If someone is an excessive drinker, people will label them mentally ill. They obviously must have something wrong with them if they just drink all the time. If someone commits a murder, they will be labeled mentally ill. If someone does drugs, robs a store, commits suicide, and so many more things – they will automatically be labeled as someone who is mentally ill. People will plead insanity so that they don’t get the death penalty in prison. Pretty much every time, if someone

The ancient Greeks viewed mental illness as having derived from the gods (Griffith 625; Ludwig 4; Neihart; Weisberg 361). According to them, different forms of madness provoked various types

They represent “the moment when madness was perceived on the social horizon of poverty, of incapacity for work, of inability to integrate with the group; the moment when madness began to rank among the problems of the city” (Foucault, 64). Madness was seen at this time as an island away from a world that prized work. The ideas of animality and passion are also significant in classical madness. Classical madness is a discourse that abandons the way of reason. Thus, madness now began to be viewed as a “social”, “political” and “economic” problem rather than a personal, “spiritual”, or “moral” problem, as the madman could no longer fit into the social order. However, a change happened in the nineteenth century as confinement was damned and efforts were made to liberate the confined. The asylums began to replace the houses of confinement and the madman was no longer considered a social but a moral pariah, and the doctors tried to work upon his conscience and feelings of remorse. The patients were no longer ill treated, chained or put in unhygienic conditions but were given healthy and nutritious food. Foucault also suggests that the structure of the “relationship between society, madness and liaison” remained