A former Undersecretary of Defense for the first Bush administration strongly advises the United States to withdraw support from the United Nations, arguing that it, with the European Union countries, undermines American interests.

Powerful photographs of the grand exteriors and crumbling interiors of America's abandoned state mental hospitals. For more than half the nation's history, vast mental hospitals were a prominent feature of the American landscape. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, over 250 institutions for the insane were built throughout the United States; by 1948, they housed more than a half million patients. The blueprint for these hospitals was set by Pennsylvania hospital superintendant Thomas Story Kirkbride: a central administration building flanked symmetrically by pavilions and surrounded by lavish grounds with pastoral vistas. Kirkbride and others believed that well-designed buildings and grounds, a peaceful environment, a regimen of fresh air, and places for work, exercise, and cultural activities would heal mental illness. But in the second half of the twentieth century, after the introduction of psychotropic drugs and policy shifts toward community-based care, patient populations declined dramatically, leaving many of these beautiful, massive buildings—and the patients who lived in them—neglected and abandoned. Architect and photographer Christopher Payne spent six years documenting the decay of state mental hospitals like these, visiting seventy institutions in thirty states. Through his lens we see splendid, palatial exteriors (some designed by such prominent architects as H. H. Richardson and Samuel Sloan) and crumbling interiors—chairs stacked against walls with peeling paint in a grand hallway; brightly colored toothbrushes still hanging on a rack; stacks of suitcases, never packed for the trip home. Accompanying Payne's striking and powerful photographs is an essay by Oliver Sacks (who described his own experience working at a state mental hospital in his book Awakenings). Sacks pays tribute to Payne's photographs and to the lives once lived in these places, “where one could be both mad and safe.”

This book is a must-read for any specialist in the history of colonial and post-colonial psychiatry, as well as a fantastic case study for those interested in the social history of European colonialism more generally.― Choice Claire Edington's fascinating look at psychiatric care in French colonial Vietnam challenges our notion of the colonial asylum as a closed setting, run by experts with unchallenged authority, from which patients rarely left. She shows instead a society in which Vietnamese communities and families actively participated in psychiatric decision-making in ways that strengthened the power of the colonial state, even as they also forced French experts to engage with local understandings of, and practices around, insanity. Beyond the Asylum reveals how psychiatrists, colonial authorities, and the Vietnamese public debated both what it meant to be abnormal, as well as normal enough to return to social life, throughout the early twentieth century. Straddling the fields of colonial history, Southeast Asian studies and the history of medicine, Beyond the Asylum shifts our perspective from the institution itself to its relationship with the world beyond its walls. This world included not only psychiatrists and their patients, but also prosecutors and parents, neighbors and spirit mediums, as well as the police and local press. How each group interacted with the mentally ill, with each other, and sometimes in opposition to each other, helped decide the fate of those both in and outside the colonial asylum.

In September of 2004, Dr. Charles Marsh arrived at the Kriegmoor Psychiatric Institute in Bayfield, Wisconsin, anxious to take on his new duties, eager to distance himself from the scandal that had forced him to resign his previous post. Among the patients assigned to Marsh at this time was a young woman named Kari Hansen, a college student who had suffered a nervous collapse during a school-sponsored anthropology dig a year previously. Subsequently, Ms. Hansen began experiencing what hospital records referred to as "a series of vivid hallucinations;" her own words described visions of an "alien" intelligence, a heretofore unknown kind of life form which appeared to her as shadows, often of indeterminate shape, occasionally taking on the form of man. Dr. Marsh came to believe these shadows were real. Shadows in the Asylum collects, for the first time anywhere, Ms. Hansen's patient records, as well as records belonging to a number of Dr. Marsh's other patients and the related historical evidence that led the doctor to his astonishing conclusions to present a bizarre story of insanity that blurs the line between fact and fiction.

Geller and Harris's accompanying history of both societal and psychiatric standards for women reveals that often even the prevailing conventions reinforced the perception that these women were "mad.".

Alan Cooper calls for a Software Revolution - his best-selling book now in trade paperback with new foreword and afterword.

Perfect for fans of The Familiars and The Glass House, this is the intoxicating story of one woman's fight for freedom in Victorian England. ????? 'Outstanding gothic psychological thriller!' ????? 'Fantastic character and fantastic story. Buy this book' ????? 'Beautifully written and incredibly addictive' ????? 'I can’t stop thinking about it' ___________ WHO IS MAUD LOVELL AND WHERE HAS SHE COME FROM? Maud has been at Angelton Lunatic Asylum for 5 years. She has no memory of her past or how she came to be here. They say she is violent and unstable, hysterical and untrustworthy. But when she's hypnotised, the memories come flooding back. And now it's time for revenge. Welcome to Angelton Lunatic Asylum. Once you're in, it's murder getting out . . . ___________ PRAISE FOR THE ASYLUM: 'Haunting and mesmerising' – Essie Fox, author of The Last Days of Leda Grey 'Vivid, disturbing and visceral, The Asylum is this year's must-read!' – Ruby Speechley, author of A Mother Like You 'This twisty rollercoaster story made me desperate for Maud's salvation and yearn for her revenge. Utterly compelling' – Kerry Fisher, author of The Woman I Was Before 'Evocative, menacing and darkly sinister. A brilliantly executed gothic thriller that will leave you breathless' – Jane Isaac, international bestselling crime fiction author 'A historic novel that seethes with claustrophobia, trauma and thoughts of revenge. What a sophisticated and gripping tale' – Fiona Mitchell, author of The Swap