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.".

Straddling the disciplines of literature and social history, and based on extensive archival research, this book makes a crucial contribution to the feminist project of writing women back into literary history. It brings to light the hitherto unrecognised literary tradition in the prehistory of psychoanalysis: the psychiatric memoir.

Voices from the Asylum is a fascinating investigation of the lives of four women incarcerated in French psychiatric hospitals in the second half of the nineteenth century. The renowned sculptor (and mistress of Rodin) Camille Claudel, the musician Hersilie Rouy, the feminist activist Marie Esquiron, and the self-proclaimed mystic and eccentric Pauline Lair Lamotte, all left first-hand accounts of their experiences. These rare and unsettling documents provide the foundation for a unique insight into the experience of psychiatric breakdown and treatment from the patient's viewpoint. By linking the question of gender to the process of medical diagnosis made by contemporary clinicians such as Sigmund Freud, this book argues that psychiatric medicine functioned as an integral part of an essentially misogynistic and oppressive society. Wilson suggests that "delusional" utterances can be read as meaningful when read as metaphorical expressions of real suffering, and as strategies to ensure the survival of a self under threat. These narratives therefore constituted an act of resistance on the part of the women who wrote them, and they prefigure the feminist revisionist histories of psychiatry that appeared later in the twentieth century. Straddling the disciplines of literature and social history, and based on extensive archival research, this book makes an important contribution to the feminist project of writing women back into literary history. It brings to light a remarkable but hitherto unrecognised literary tradition in the prehistory of psychoanalysis: the psychiatric memoir.

A collection of first hand accounts describing what has driven asylum seekers to flee their homelands to come to Australia seeking refuge, and detailing the traumas involved both in flight from their homes and in detention on Australian shores. Also looks at Australia's perception of asylum seekers and media portrayals.

Voices and stories from the patients of Menston Asylum

Voices and stories from the patients of Menston Asylum

Dorothea Dix, born in a dysfunctional nineteenth century family, was the least likely person to bring about major social change and alter the way the world thought of people who hear voices; the mentally ill. At the end of her life she recalls the triumphs and defeats in her fight to establish a place of caring and safety for them. and the asylum movement is born. It is only then that Dorothea realizes her biggest struggle was coming to terms with her own childhood.