Hysteria And Related Mental Disorders

Hysteria and Related Mental Disorders: An Approach to Psychological Medicine deals with the problems of diagnosis and their bearing on management and treatment of hysteria and related hysteriform conditions. This book is composed of 16 chapters, and starts with a description of the etiology and psychopathology of hysteria. These topics are followed by intensive discussions on the clinical manifestations and diagnosis of hysteria and related mental disorders, including neurosis, psychosis, schizophrenia, and multiple personality. Other chapters consider the nature of dissociative phenomena from a structural and dynamic point of view, as well as its significance in understanding the etiology of ego disorders. This book also looks into some aspects of language development, the conversion process, and the features of hysteria as a communicative disorder. The last chapters present several medical cases illustrating the differences between conversion hysteria and psychophysiologic autonomic disorder. These chapters also deal with the types of psychotherapy for hysteria. This book is of great value to psychologists, neurologists, clinicians, and psychotherapists.

Hysteria as a neurosis seems to have disappeared altogether from the psychiatric manuals; but there are articles here and there, particularly in the United States and France, which advocate the existence of hysteria as a psychosis. Hysterical psychosis is the clinical combination of a hysterical personality with a seemingly psychotic state. Looking back to nineteenth-century psychiatry, Katrien Libbrecht attempts to answer the question: Is there such a thing as a hysterical psychosis or are we dealing with hysteria exhibiting psychotic features? Hysterical Psychosis is divided into three sections. The first part of the book carries the reader back to the second half of the nineteenth century, the heyday of the study of hysteria on the eve of the discovery of psychonanalysis. The second part of the book discusses the implications of the generalized impact of Bleuler's concept of schizophrenia during the interbellum period. The last section of the book deals with the current reemergence of hysterical psychosis from the 1960s to the 1990s. Libbrecht provides a historical survey of the most important psychiatric and psychoanalytic references on hysterical psychosis, as well as a review of current research on the matter. She sheds new light on reasons for the disappearance of the diagnosis of hysteria rn the 1950s and the emergence of the notion of hysterical psychosis during the 1960s. Hysterical Psychosis is a landmark study that is essential for psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, medical practitioners, and historians of psychology.

Despite the evolution and the importance of hysteria in the domain of psychiatry, the disease's history has been largely ignored. This volume covers the historical development of the concepts of hysteria's nature, origins, symptoms and management.

A noted neurologist challenges the widespread misunderstanding of brain disease and mental illness. How the Brain Lost Its Mind tells the rich and compelling story of two confounding ailments, syphilis and hysteria, and the extraordinary efforts to confront their effects on mental life. How does the mind work? Where does madness lie, in the brain or in the mind? How should it be treated? Throughout the nineteenth century, syphilis--a disease of mad poets, musicians, and artists--swept through the highest and lowest rungs of European society like a plague. Known as "the Great Imitator," it could produce almost any form of mental or physical illness, and it would bring down a host of famous and infamous characters--among them Guy de Maupassant, Vincent van Gogh, the Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Al Capone. It was the first truly psychiatric disease and it filled asylums to overflowing. At the same time, an outbreak of bizarre behaviors resembling epilepsy, but with no identifiable source in the body, strained the diagnostic skills of the great neurologists. It was referred to as hysteria. For more than a century, neurosyphilis stood out as the archetype of a brain-based mental illness, fully understood but largely forgotten, and today far from gone. Hysteria, under many different names, remains unexplained and epidemic. These two conditions stand at opposite poles of the current debate over the role of the brain in mental illness. Hysteria led Freud to insert sex into psychology. Neurosyphilis led to the proliferation of mental institutions. The problem of managing the inmates led to the abuse of lobotomy and electroshock therapy, and ultimately the overuse of psychotropic drugs. Today we know that syphilitic madness was a destructive disease of the brain while hysteria and, more broadly, many varieties of mental illness reside solely in the mind. Or do they? Afflictions once written off as "hysterical" continue to elude explanation. Addiction, alcoholism, autism, ADHD, Tourette syndrome, depression, and sociopathy, though regarded as brain-based, have not been proven to be so. In these pages, the authors raise a host of philosophical and practical questions. What is the difference between a sick mind and a sick brain? If we understood everything about the brain, would we understand ourselves? By delving into an overlooked history, this book shows how neuroscience and brain scans alone cannot account for a robust mental life, or a deeply disturbed one.

Wenegrat (psychiatry, Stanford U. School of Medicine) argues that women's lack of social power, as defined as the ability to provide for one's needs and security and to make decisions based on one's own desires, is to blame for their excess risk for certain mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and multiple personality. He reviews women's social power and mental illness from an evolutionary and cross-cultural perspective and addresses 19th- century women's disorders and illness roles. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

“The landmark book that argued that psychiatry consistently expands its definition of mental illness to impose its authority over moral and cultural conflict.” — New York Times The 50th anniversary edition of the most influential critique of psychiatry every written, with a new preface on the age of Prozac and Ritalin and the rise of designer drugs, plus two bonus essays. Thomas Szasz's classic book revolutionized thinking about the nature of the psychiatric profession and the moral implications of its practices. By diagnosing unwanted behavior as mental illness, psychiatrists, Szasz argues, absolve individuals of responsibility for their actions and instead blame their alleged illness. He also critiques Freudian psychology as a pseudoscience and warns against the dangerous overreach of psychiatry into all aspects of modern life.

A provocative argument that mental illnesses are not diseases, but the product of varying expectations shared by therapists and patients.

In the last half-century we have witnessed a dramatic expansion of American corporate power into every corner of the world, accompanied by an equally awesome growth in U.S. military power. This book analyzes this global empire: what interests it serves and what effect it has on the peoples of the world and on their struggles for real democracy and social justice. The enormous cost of this superpower expansionism is borne by the U.S. public. The empire feeds off the republic. A richly financed corporate-military complex is matched at home by increasing poverty, the defunding of state and local governments, drastic cutbacks in human services, decaying infrastructure, and impending ecological disaster. This book shows that the people of the targeted nations suffer expropriation of their communal wealth and natural resources, complete privatization and deregulation of their economies, loss of local markets, deterioration of their living standards, growing debt burdens, and the bloodstained suppression of their democratic movements. The empire's wars help maintain the international system of finance capital. Countries that attempt to pursue an independent course of self-development apart from global free-market capitalism are demonized as anti-American and anti-West and subjected to sanctions, economic strangulation, regime change, and if necessary, direct aerial attack and invasion.