Animal Madness

**“Science Friday” Summer Reading Pick** **Discover magazine Top 5 Summer Reads** **People magazine Best Summer Reads** “A lovely, big-hearted book…brimming with compassion and the tales of the many, many humans who devote their days to making animals well” (The New York Times). Have you ever wondered if your dog might be a bit depressed? How about heartbroken or homesick? Animal Madness takes these questions seriously, exploring the topic of mental health and recovery in the animal kingdom and turning up lessons that Publishers Weekly calls “Illuminating…Braitman’s delightful balance of humor and poignancy brings each case of life….[Animal Madness’s] continuous dose of hope should prove medicinal for humans and animals alike.” Susan Orlean calls Animal Madness “a marvelous, smart, eloquent book—as much about human emotion as it is about animals and their inner lives.” It is “a gem…that can teach us much about the wildness of our own minds” (Psychology Today).

Have you ever wondered if your dog might be a bit depressed? How about heartbroken or homesick? Animal Madness takes these questions seriously, exploring the topic of mental health and recovery in the animal kingdom.

Origins of Madness: Psychopathology in Animal Life provides information pertinent to the abnormal behavior in animals and its bearing on human psychopathology. This book discusses the behavioral abnormalities of animals in the wild or under circumstances of confinement, as in circuses, laboratories, households, and zoos, where the abnormalities appear without intention. Organized into 11 sections encompassing 44 chapters, this book begins with an overview of psychosomatic studies in animals. This text then examines the two fundamental methods for producing experimental neuroses. Other chapters consider the practical implication of the basic parallelism between animal and human neuroses. This book discusses as well the emotional disorders responsible for the inability of psychoneurotic patients and experimentally neurotic animals to cope with real life situations as they happen. The final chapter deals with the method that produces a striking behavior abnormality in dogs. This book is a valuable resource for veterinarians and clinical psychologists.

Through much of history our relationship with the earth has been plagued by ambivalence--we not only enjoy and appreciate the forces and manifestations of nature, we seek to plunder, alter, and control them. Here Paul Shepard uncovers the cultural roots of our ecological crisis and proposes ways to repair broken bonds with the earth, our past, and nature. Ultimately encouraging, he notes, "There is a secret person undamaged in every individual. We have not lost, and cannot lose, the genuine impulse."

This book shows how an understanding of the nature and role of insanity in Hegel's writing provides intriguing new points of access to many of the central themes of his larger philosophic project. Berthold-Bond situates Hegel's theory of madness within the history of psychiatric practice during the great reform period at the turn of the eighteenth century, and shows how Hegel developed a middle path between the stridently opposed camps of "empirical" and "romantic" medicine, and of "somatic" and "psychical" practitioners. A key point of the book is to show that Hegel does not conceive of madness and health as strictly opposing states, but as kindred phenomena sharing many of the same underlying mental structures and strategies, so that the ontologies of insanity and rationality involve a mutually illuminating, mirroring relation. Hegel's theory is tested against the critiques of the institution of psychiatry and the very concept of madness by such influential twentieth-century authors as Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz, and defended as offering a genuinely reconciling position in the contemporary debate between the "social labeling" and "medical" models of mental illness.

The bustle of the crowd is waning and the zoo is quieting for the night. The polar bear picks up the ball and dribbles onto the court; the nightly game begins. A frog jumps up to play one-on-one and then a penguin waddles in to join the team. Count along as the game grows with the addition of each new animal and the field of players builds to ten. Three zebras serve as referees and keep the clock, because this game must be over before the zookeeper makes her rounds.

Do depictions of crazy cat ladies obscure more sinister structural violence against animals hoarded in factory farms? Highlighting the frequent pathologization of animal lovers and animal rights activists, this book examines how the “madness” of our relationships with animals intersects with the “madness” of taking animals seriously. The essays collected in this volume argue that “animaladies” are expressive of political and psychological discontent, and the characterization of animal advocacy as mad or “crazy” distracts attention from broader social unease regarding human exploitation of animal life. While allusions to madness are both subtle and overt, they are also very often gendered, thought to be overly sentimental with an added sense that emotions are being directed at the wrong species. Animaladies are obstacles for the political uptake of interest in animal issues-as the intersections between this volume and established feminist scholarship show, the fear of being labeled unreasonable or mad still has political currency.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, "Animal's People" is by turns a profane, scathingly funny, and piercingly honest tale of a boy so badly damaged by the poisons released during a chemical plant leak that he walks on all fours.