"Humorous essays about the fashion industry"--

From “master of cosmic horror” (Library Journal) Mary SanGiovanni, comes the latest terrifying novel featuring occult specialist Kathy Ryan . . . A mind is a terrible thing to destroy . . . Kathy has been hired to assess the threat of patient Henry Banks, an inmate at the Connecticut-Newlyn Hospital for the Criminally Insane, the same hospital where her brother is housed. Her employers believe that Henry has the ability to open doors to other dimensions with his mind—making him one of the most dangerous men in modern history. Because unbeknownst to Kathy, her clients are affiliated with certain government organizations that investigate people like Henry—and the potential to weaponize such abilities. What Kathy comes to understand in interviewing Henry, and in her unavoidable run-ins with her brother, is that Henry can indeed use his mind to create “Tulpas”—worlds, people, and creatures so vivid they come to actual life. But now they want life outside of Henry. And they'll stop at nothing to complete their emancipation. It's up to Kathy—with her brother's help—to stop them, and if possible, to save Henry before the Tulpas take him over—and everything else around him. Praise for the novels of Mary SanGiovanni “SanGiovanni evokes a Lovecraftian sensibility in this action-filled story. . . . Scary, suspenseful, smart, and gory, the novel is also beautifully set and described.” —Library Journal on Savage Woods “A feast of both visceral and existential horror.” —F. Paul Wilson on Thrall “Filled to the brim with mounting terror.” —Gary A. Braunbeck on The Hollower “A fast-building, high-tension ride.” —James A. Moore on The Hollower

This open access monograph provides sociological insight into governmental action on the administration of asylum in the European context. It offers an in-depth understanding of how decision-making officials encounter and respond to structural contradictions in the asylum procedure produced by diverging legal, political, and administrative objectives. The study focuses on structural aspects on the one hand, such as legal and organisational elements, and aspects of agency on the other hand, examining the social practices and processes going on at the frontside and the backside of the administrative asylum system. Coverage is based on a case study using ethnographic methods, including qualitative interviews, participant observation, as well as artefact analysis. This case study is positioned within a broader context and allows for comparison within and beyond the European system, building a bridge to the international scientific community. In addition, the author links the empirical findings to sociological theory. She explains the identified patterns of social practice in asylum administration along the theories of social practices, social construction and structuration. This helps to contribute to the often missing theoretical development in this particular field of research. Overall, this book provides a sociological contribution to a key issue in today's debate on immigration in Europe and beyond. It will appeal to researchers, policy makers, administrators, and practitioners as well as students and readers interested in immigration and asylum.

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.".

An intimate photographic journey into 115 years of history inside a nineteenth-century asylum.

Starry Night is a fully illustrated account of Van Gogh's time at the asylum in Saint-Remy. Despite the challenges of ill health and asylum life, Van Gogh continued to produce a series of masterpieces – cypresses, wheatfields, olive groves and sunsets. He wrote very little about the asylum in letters to his brother Theo, so this book sets out to give an impression of daily life behind the walls of the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole and looks at Van Gogh through fresh eyes, with newly discovered material.