spent way too much effort on that

I'm avoiding writing my college application, which is a surprisingly
effective motivator for working.

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+# Madness in the Nineteenth Century
+This week we discussed "madness" in the nineteenth century. In your
+reading journal, please reflect on how mental health is understood
+today. How is it similar and what ways is it different? How do you think
+ideas about mental health relate to our on going discussion of "health?"
+
+Like physiological health, mental health is an ideal, and its nonmedical
+cultural environment shapes it deeply.
+Victorian ideas about women's place in the Cult of Domesticity, for
+example, structured mental wellbeing around how well they fit into that
+mold.
+The general cultural unfitness of a mental patient stigmatized mental
+health, which has remained today.
+There is gradual work to remove this stigma, but it nonetheless remains.
+In fact, despite great medical change around the treatment of mental
+illness, like the development of the "talking cure" in contrast to the
+rest cure or opiates, popular treatment of mental illnesses remains
+similar to 19th century beliefs.
+They are seen as signs of weakness or essential deformity of the person.
+
+[IMAGE: Don't Worry---Cheer Up. / Worry wears worse than work / Worry
+wastes energy, work utilizes it. / Worry subtracts, work multiplies. /
+Worry dwarfs, depresses, confuses, kills. / Worry stops digestion,
+paralyzes the bowels, slows the heart. / Worry anticipates failure and
+creates disaster. / Worry is a mind malady---a  mental unsoundness. /
+Anxiety in the face of grave danger is natural and unavoidable. / Worry
+about petty troubles, or even big ones, is useless and may become
+calamitous. / Worry is often a habit and may be cured by an effort of
+the will. / Ofttimes worry is due to loss of sleep, tea or coffe
+indigestion or constipation. / Take a neutral bath at bedtime, eat
+biologically, abjure tea and coffee, move the bowels three times a day
+and---CHEER UP. CAPTION: A 1920 medical manual from J.H. Kellogg
+recommends sufferers of neurasthenia to stop worrying and cheer up in
+poetry, showing some of the "blame" being put on the patient. SRC:
+https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Why_the_%22blues%22
+%2C_%22nerves%22%2C_neuralgias%2C_and_chronic_fatigue_or_neurasthenia_
+%28IA_whybluesnervesne00kell%29.pdf (page 8)]
+
+Mental health is not fundamentally different from physiological health,
+and it often derives from physiological issues itself, like addiction.
+And exaggerated in mental health diagnoses and attitudes toward ill
+people is discrimination, especially racially.
+Black people, paralleling their general medical undertreatment, remain
+undiagnosed or misdiagnosed for mental illness more often than white
+people, and American culture, at least, is much more likely to
+sympathise with white mentally ill people than black mentally ill
+people.
+"The odds that white shooters will receive the mental illness frame are
+roughly 19 times greater than the odds for black shooters," one study
+reports.
+
+Mental illness is often characterized differently by authors depending
+on their intent.
+In Doyle's *The Sign of Four*, for example, Holmes is treated as
+ever-curious and having a very active mind because of his addiction to
+cocaine.
+Nineteenth century doctors treated male neurasthenics as hardy with
+strong work ethic rather than stigmatizing their disease.
+But nineteenth century doctors, in medical journals discussed in
+Washington's *Medical Apartheid*, sought to discredit black people and
+assigned them the moniker of madness.
+
+Mental health also often has stronger behavioral interpretations than
+physiological health.
+In the scheme of physiological health, vice, infection, and grime are
+perceived as causes or intrinsic symbols of unhealth.
+However, more liberal ideas about mental health allow interpretation of
+addiction, trauma, suppression, and even larger social trends as
+unhealthy.
+Sometimes this acts as a lens, with unhealth being a simple proxy for
+what the author considers immoral or degenerate, but, like the general
+idea of health, the social ideal of keeping people interacting
+positively with society and behaving "normally" restricts certain
+behaviors
+
+[IMAGE: Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, holding a cigar.
+Photographed by his son-in-law, Max Halberstadt, c. 1921. CAPTION:
+Freud's developments in psychology were, like other doctors, trying to
+develop a sense of objectivity about mental diseases. They generated
+new health-based interpretations of behavioral and moralistic behavior.
+SRC: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/
+commons/1/12/Sigmund_Freud_LIFE.jpg (Public Domain)]
+
+Sources:
+- https://psmag.com/social-justice/white-mass-shooters-are-treated-more-sympathetically-by-the-media
+- https://www.healthline.com/health/racism-mental-health-diagnoses
+- "Medical Apartheid" by Harriet A Washington
+- https://www.mhanational.org/issues/black-and-african-american-communities-and-mental-health
+- Markley lectures: Freud and the development of the "talking cure"
+- Doyle's "The Sign of Four"
+- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurasthenia
+- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteria#Sigmund_Freud