diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'markley/blog/04_madness')
| -rw-r--r-- | markley/blog/04_madness | 92 |
1 files changed, 92 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/markley/blog/04_madness b/markley/blog/04_madness new file mode 100644 index 0000000..446c511 --- /dev/null +++ b/markley/blog/04_madness @@ -0,0 +1,92 @@ +# 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 |