The conclusions drawn, though pertinent and relevant, are not particularly original and are better argued elsewhere. While the detailed research and breadth of information Appignanesi presents are remarkable, the academic nature of the prose, along with the heavy use of psycho-jargon, make it unlikely that this book will reach a wide audience. As other writers – many of them feminists – have noted, the diagnosis and treatment of female mental illness has often reflected the social and political attitudes of the day toward women. She also chronicles the professionalization and medicalization of the field, with the consequent “evolution” of practitioners from priest to alienist to psychiatrist. As Appignanesi notes, one of the most telling conclusions that can be drawn from this survey is the fact that, despite the voluminous amount of research on the subject, the treatment of mental illness, particularly for women, remains as much a mystery as ever.Īppignanesi documents with painstaking detail the treatment of women’s mental illness from its religious roots through to Freudian sexual theories and on to today’s systematized, drug-driven management, using some of the most famous and infamous case studies through the ages. Mary Lamb, Theroigne de Méricourt, Alice James, Anna O (Bertha Pappenheim), Dora (Ida Bauer) Augustine, Elizabeth Severn, Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), HD (Hilda Doolittle), Princess Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingham, Zelda Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath and Anna Kavan.In her impressive and frustrating new book, Lisa Appignanesi, author of Freud’s Women, Losing the Dead, and others, provides a tour through the minefield of women’s mental illness (real or assumed) from the 18th century’s Age of Reason through to the modern era of pharmacological cure-alls. Inspired by Lisa Appignanesi’s acclaimed book, Mad, Bad and Sad also demonstrates how women today conduct their own explorations of mind and imagination in challenging works of art. Through intimate and revealing portraits, shown alongside original historical documents, the exhibition traces key moments in the history of ‘female maladies’ and counterpoints them with women’s boldly inventive art today. How did the mind doctors of the 1900s view their female patients? What did they make of their variously diagnosed nerves, melancholy, mania, obsession, self-mutilation, tics, possession, hysteria, desire and rebellion? Why in the early 20 th century was psychoanalysis liberating for so many female authors and artists? Does gender determine the way we express or are allowed to express mental distress? Some of the questions explored in Mad, Bad and Sad.
© Jane Fradgley with kind permission of Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity
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