Dr. Gabriella Mondini, a strong-willed, young Venetian woman, has followed her father in the path of medicine. She possesses a singleminded passion for the art of physick, even though, in 1590, the male-dominated establishment is reluctant to accept a woman doctor. So when her father disappears on a mysterious journey, Gabriella's own status in the Venetian medical society is threatened. Her father has left clues -- beautiful, thoughtful, sometimes torrid, and often enigmatic letters from his travels as he researches his vast encyclopedia, The Book of Diseases. After ten years of missing his kindness, insight, and guidance, Gabriella decides to set off on a quest to find him -- a daunting journey that will take her through great university cities, centers of medicine, and remote villages across Europe. Despite setbacks, wary strangers, and the menaces of the road, the young doctor bravely follows the clues to her lost father, all while taking notes on maladies and treating the ill to supplement her own work. Gorgeous and brilliantly written, and filled with details about science, medicine, food, and madness, The Book of Madness and Cures is an unforgettable debut.

The philosophy of psychosis and the psychosis of philosophy: a philosopher draws on his experience of madness. In this book, philosopher and linguist Wouter Kusters examines the philosophy of psychosis—and the psychosis of philosophy. By analyzing the experience of psychosis in philosophical terms, Kusters not only emancipates the experience of the psychotic from medical classification, he also emancipates the philosopher from the narrowness of textbooks and academia, allowing philosophers to engage in real-life praxis, philosophy in vivo. Philosophy and madness—Kusters's preferred, non-medicalized term—coexist, one mirroring the other. Kusters draws on his own experience of madness—two episodes of psychosis, twenty years apart—as well as other first-person narratives of psychosis. Speculating about the maddening effect of certain words and thought, he argues, and demonstrates, that the steady flow of philosophical deliberation may sweep one into a full-blown acute psychotic episode. Indeed, a certain kind of philosophizing may result in confusion, paradoxes, unworldly insights, and circular frozenness reminiscent of madness. Psychosis presents itself to the psychotic as an inescapable truth and reality. Kusters evokes the mad person's philosophical or existential amazement at reality, thinking, time, and space, drawing on classic autobiographical accounts of psychoses by Antonin Artaud, Daniel Schreber, and others, as well as the work of phenomenological psychiatrists and psychologists and such phenomenologists as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He considers the philosophical mystic and the mystical philosopher, tracing the mad undercurrent in the Husserlian philosophy of time; visits the cloud castles of mystical madness, encountering LSD devotees, philosophers, theologians, and nihilists; and, falling to earth, finds anxiety, emptiness, delusions, and hallucinations. Madness and philosophy proceed and converge toward a single vanishing point.

In the mid-1800s, a utopian movement to rehabilitate the insane resulted in a wave of publicly funded asylums—many of which became unexpected centers of cultural activity. Housed in magnificent structures with lush grounds, patients participated in theatrical programs, debating societies, literary journals, schools, and religious services. Theaters of Madness explores both the culture these rich offerings fomented and the asylum’s place in the fabric of nineteenth-century life, reanimating a time when the treatment of the insane was a central topic in debates over democracy, freedom, and modernity. Benjamin Reiss explores the creative lives of patients and the cultural demands of their doctors. Their frequently clashing views turned practically all of American culture—from blackface minstrel shows to the works of William Shakespeare—into a battlefield in the war on insanity. Reiss also shows how asylums touched the lives and shaped the writing of key figures, such as Emerson and Poe, who viewed the system alternately as the fulfillment of a democratic ideal and as a kind of medical enslavement. Without neglecting this troubling contradiction, Theaters of Madness prompts us to reflect on what our society can learn from a generation that urgently and creatively tried to solve the problem of mental illness.

Why do some men become convinced—despite what doctors tell them—that their penises have, simply, disappeared. Why do people across the world become convinced that they are cursed to die on a particular date—and then do? Why do people in Malaysia suddenly “run amok”? In The Geography of Madness, acclaimed magazine writer Frank Bures investigates these and other “culture-bound” syndromes, tracing each seemingly baffling phenomenon to its source. It’s a fascinating, and at times rollicking, adventure that takes the reader around the world and deep into the oddities of the human psyche. What Bures uncovers along the way is a poignant and stirring story of the persistence of belief, fear, and hope.

Parallel to An Unquiet Mind and The Glass Castle, a deeply personal memoir calling for the destigmatization of mental illness

The year was 1950. Mary Ella Harris, works hard sharecropping alongside her husband, a man with a penchant for gambling, drinking, and associating with unsavory white people. When she is cornered in her home by Leon Turner, a white man who refuses to take no for an answer, Mary Ella narrowly avoids an attempted rape. After his arrest, Leon escapes jail and enacts a bloody revenge with two accomplices. With the eyes of the nation watching, the state itself is on trial. The jury's controversial decision ultimately serves as a catalyst for change.

It is true that little is known about the mind and for that matter the mind in the state of derangement. This book does not unlock the secrets of either but it does give the reader a look into the different states and perhaps possible causes that lead to insanity. The author provides a collaboration of letters taken from history that describes the point of view of the patient and their families as well as the physicians who dealt with the patients.

Can we reach the psychotic subject in their delusion? Psychopathological theorists often try to find a way to characterise this subject's inner predicament so that their opaque utterances and actions will now rationally hang together. In this pathbreaking work, philosopher and clinical psychologist Richard G. T. Gipps demonstrates how such efforts at rational retrieval actually result in us setting our face against the psychotic subject in their distress. Bringing together patient memoir, psychopathological observation and philosophical thought, Gipps offers a profound alternative. On the one hand he shows how, by appreciating just why we can't locate rational order within psychotic thought, we can better understand what it is to suffer delusion and psychosis. On the other, he recovers for us the value of such expressive, motivational and symbolic forms of understanding as only become available once we've been turned away at reason's door. In such ways Gipps not only solves the psychopathological problem of delusion, but also shows us how to bear a truer witness to the psychotic subject in their brokenness, pain and despair.

Throughout most of history, in China the insane were kept within the home and treated by healers who claimed no specialized knowledge of their condition. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, psychiatric ideas and institutions began to influence longstanding beliefs about the proper treatment for the mentally ill. In The Invention of Madness, Emily Baum traces a genealogy of insanity from the turn of the century to the onset of war with Japan in 1937, revealing the complex and convoluted ways in which “madness” was transformed in the Chinese imagination into “mental illness.” ​ Focusing on typically marginalized historical actors, including municipal functionaries and the urban poor, The Invention of Madness shifts our attention from the elite desire for modern medical care to the ways in which psychiatric discourses were implemented and redeployed in the midst of everyday life. New meanings and practices of madness, Baum argues, were not just imposed on the Beijing public but continuously invented by a range of people in ways that reflected their own needs and interests. Exhaustively researched and theoretically informed, The Invention of Madness is an innovative contribution to medical history, urban studies, and the social history of twentieth-century China.

This book proposes to open up the debate on mental disorders, to get people interested and talking, and to get them thinking. For example, what is schizophrenia? Why is it so common? Why does it affect human beings and not animals? What might this tell us about our mind and body, language and creativity, music and religion? What are the boundaries between mental disorder and 'normality'? Is there a relationship between mental disorder and genius? These are some of the difficult but important questions that this book confronts, with the overarching aim of exploring what mental disorders can teach us about human nature and the human condition. Dr Neel Burton qualified in neuroscience and medicine from the University of London and is a Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He is the the author of several books, including a prize-winning textbook of psychiatry and a prize-winning self-help book for people with schizophrenia. He lives and teaches in Oxford.