Madness Of Modern Families

This title provides hilarious insight into the modern rat race that is modern middle-class parenting.

Parenting in the modern world is an overwhelming concept. It seems to divide everyone from psychologists and politicians to scientists and salesmen, leaving the parents themselves with a terrible headache as a result. How can anyone live up to such expansive and conflicting expectations? As Zoe Williams explores, the madness begins before the baby has even arrived: hysteria is rife surrounding everything from drinking alcohol and eating cheese to using a new frying pan. And it only gets worse. The list of things you need to consider (as well as the things you never realised you needed to consider) is ever-increasing, and questions of breastfeeding, buggies, staying at home, schooling - and what your mother-in-law thinks you're doing wrong - take over completely. The task of raising a child has been turned into a circus of ludicrous proportions. Combining laugh-out-loud tales of parenthood with myth-busting facts and figures, Zoe provides the antithesis of all parenting discussions to date. After all, parents managed perfectly well for centuries before this modern madness, so why do today's mothers and fathers make such an almighty fuss about everything?

"David Jones has written a compelling book about the complex issues entailed in being family members of sufferers from mental illness. The book provides us with a critical appraisal of the sociological and psychological conceptual layers and the policy context necessary for understanding these issues, all too often missing in other books written about this subject... Through in-depth interviews of forty carers, coached in a way which enables the carers to talk in their own voice, we get the rare opportunity of understanding the world of these carers ... In letting the carers speak Jones is enabling all of us to listen to them with the respect they deserve... All of us - but especially mental health professionals, policy makers and researchers - need to learn from the methodology utilised in this study, and the content of the rich experiential seam Jones exposes, as to how to listen better to carers, and on which themes to focus in our working partnership with users and carers." - Professor Shulamit Ramon, Anglia Polytechnic University, Cambridge This book fills a gap in our knowledge about the experiences of families of people suffering from severe mental illness. Original research material is used to support claims that families are struggling with complex feelings such as loss, anger and shame. It is also argued that the ideas families themselves hold about mental illness form an important part of the cultural world in which mental illnesses are understood. This stimulating book challenges many conventional assumptions about family relationships by arguing that they have to be understood in terms of 'myths' that bring a certain amount of order to complex areas of emotional life. The author argues that families if properly understood, can provide significant support for people with severe mental illness.

"Drawing on a wide range of sources including interdiction procedures, records of criminal justice, documentation from mental hospitals, and medical literature, this book provides a comprehensive study of the spaces in which madness was recorded in Tuscany during the eighteenth century. It proposes the notion of itineraries of madness, which, intended as an heuristic devise, enables us to examine records of madness across the different spaces where it was disclosed, casting light on the connections between how madness was understood and experienced, the language employed to describe it, and public and private responses devised to cope with it. Placing the emotional experience of the Tuscan families at the core of its analysis, this book stresses the central role of families in the shaping of new understandings of madness and how lay notions interacted with legal and medical knowledge. It argues that perceptions of madness in the eighteenth century were closely connected to new cultural concerns regarding family relationships and family roles, which resulted in a shift in the meanings of and attitudes to mental disturbances"--

Mad people's historical anthologies and republished writings -- Mad people's perspectives in institutional histories -- Mad people's historical biographies -- Mad people's activist histories -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Chapter 16: Dementia: confusion at the borderlands of aging and madness -- Dementia in the distant past -- Framing dementia as a brain disease in modern German psychiatry -- Framing dementia as a problem in the adjustment to aging in mid-century American psychodynamic psychiatry -- Framing dementia as dread disease and major public health crisis in an aging world -- Conclusion: the ongoing entanglement of dementia and aging -- Notes -- PART VI: Maladies, disorders, and treatments -- Chapter 17: Passions and moods -- Emotions in history -- Grand narratives and overarching themes -- Specific stories and critical contexts -- Conclusion and areas for further scholarship -- Notes -- Chapter 18: Psychosis -- Madness -- Psychosis is a special thing -- If "psychotic" means "psychosis-like," then what, pray tell, is psychosis like? -- Schizophrenia -- Notes -- Chapter 19: Somatic treatments -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Chapter 20: Psychotherapy in society: historical reflections -- Notes -- Chapter 21: The antidepressant era revisited: towards differentiation and patient-empowerment in diagnosis and treatment -- Psychopharmacology and historiography -- Towards a new chemistry of the mind -- Mother's little helpers -- Appetite for new chemical wonders for the mind -- Towards differentiation and patient empowerment in the era of genomics -- Notes -- Index

Madness at the Theatre studies the theatrical representation of madness from the classical Greek period through to the 21st century. Professor Oyebode charts the portrayal of madness by the world's great playwrights across the centuries and argues that whereas acts of madness are described but unseen in Greek drama, Shakespeare brought these behaviours to centre stage. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries aberrant behaviour was portrayed in domestic settings by Ibsen - theatrical madness became a family drama. Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill drew on their own families for their explorations of madness and addiction. Pinter's masterful use of the ambiguity of language finds strong echoes in the psychiatric clinic. Soyinka emphasised the social context - the personal malady as reflection of a greater malaise in society. Finally, Sarah Kane created plays that were the physical embodiment of her inner world. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the language of drama, the depiction of mental illness, and in the wider place of madness as a concept within society.

What did it mean to be mad in seventeenth-century England? This book uses vivid autobiographical accounts of mental disorder to explore the ways madness was identified and experienced from the inside, asking how certain people came to be defined as insane, and what we can learn from the accounts they wrote.