I had the feeling that the author could have made two books out of this one. While the material is all interesting, this approach seems scattered and sometimes hard to follow.
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. 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. There have always been more female mental patients than male, and they have been treated differently most of the time. 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. At first, hospitals for the mentally ill were nothing more than storage facilities to keep the patient out of the families hair. 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.
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