Summary:

A son’s story of his father’s illness, treatment, and resultant destruction by the "psychic-driving" experiments of Dr. Ewen Cameron at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute in the 1950’s. The effect of the father’s illness on the family is recounted, as is the son’s gradual realization, only when he is himself about to become a psychiatrist, that something abnormal must have taken place during those long hospitalizations. Weinstein tells other patient stories in some detail as he recounts the legal fight for compensation awarded finally in October, 1988.

View full annotation

Summary:

Banishing Verona concerns a 22-year-old house painter living in London. One soon realizes that Zeke Cafarelli is not normal. He has had a nervous breakdown a few years earlier; collects clocks--he has nine at the beginning of the novel and adds two more by novel's end--which he takes apart and restores; he has basic questions about interpersonal relations that, were it not for his illness, mentioned once, briefly and vaguely (24), one would describe as childlike naiveté.

For example, he wonders why people lie. Or, why is it so easy to identify vegetables (his parents are greengrocers) but not people each time one encounters them in even slightly different settings? Several times the author describes Zeke's mother or father (whom Zeke calls Gwen and Don, respectively) while their son is trying to confirm their identity as his parents.

Quite early in the narrative, like a dea ex machina, Verona MacIntyre enters Zeke's life. Or perhaps Venus on the half shell would be a more specific identification of the dea, since Verona is pregnant, and soon becomes as naked as Venus in the famous painting by Botticelli, to whose paintings Zeke is likened with his angelic appearance and lustrous hair. The two become oceanic--if not star-crossed--lovers-at-first-sight since Verona has to traipse off to Boston to help bail her sociopathic brother out of yet another financial and amorous mess of his own making. Despite the appearances of Jigger (Verona and Henry's grandfather in the persona of a long letter to Verona), and Toby (a mutual lover-friend of Verona and Henry), and Maurice (Gwen's lover), the plot does not seem unwieldy.

View full annotation

Summary:

Louis Drax is a nine-year-old boy living in France with his stay at home mother and Air France pilot father. Such an apparently normal family description is the merest tissue of appearances. The father is probably an alcoholic and unfaithful; the son is "accident-prone" (a nearly fatal episode of SIDS at two weeks of age, a near fatal electrocution at age 6 after falling on the tracks of the métro in Lyon; salmonella, tetanus, botulism, meningitis, etc. [or, as Louis is fond of saying, "blah, blah, blah."]) and the mother has issues that only emerge as one becomes more deeply involved in what is a mystery story.

Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s A Chronicle of a Death Foretold, or Janet Lewis’s superb The Trial of Søren Qvist, one knows the ending early on (page 16 in Louis Drax), but not the details. The why and the how are the stuff of the novelist’s art in all three books.

With premonition of more danger, Louis goes on a family picnic (see below for the author’s biographical basis for this tale) and winds up at the bottom of a ravine, dead. Drowned and dead. A few hours later, in the morgue, he is found to be alive. Comatose and in a persistent vegetative state but alive. He is therefore transferred to the care of a neurologist specializing in comatose patients at the Clinique de l’Horizon (formerly l’Hôpital des Incurables).

It is here that the mystery unfolds. The questions are: How did Louis end up at the bottom of the ravine? Did his father, now missing, push him as his distraught mother alleges? What role does the clearly neurotic mother play in this tragedy? And who exactly is Louis Drax? Lastly, how do the mysterious letters allegedly from him, written while still in a coma, come to be?

View full annotation

Summary:

This volume belongs in the category of cross-cultural studies of medicine and the humanities. Its main audience is scholars of nineteenth-century American psychiatry and culture. The author divides his study into six chapters, each with a topic, including the simultaneous emergence of nineteenth-century public debate about improving the treatment of insanity and the movement to abolish slavery; cultural activities in asylums directed toward humanizing the patients; bardolatry in British and American medical circles; discussions of Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville in the context of their literary and personal relationship with madness; a chapter on captivity narratives and popular novels by former female and male patients; and an epilogue.

Unlike today, "In mid-nineteenth-century America, the condition of the mentally ill seemed to demand-and to a large degree received-national attention and the full creative energy of a group of dedicated reformers" (p. 2). Reformers linked the emancipation of slaves with curing the delusions of the insane. Slaves and the mentally ill had in common deprivation of their civil liberties; however, the difference was that white mental patients could be expected to grow up eventually, whereas black slaves would always remain children, and hence could not be trusted with the right to vote, own property, or sign contracts.Some causes of insanity were deemed to be the individual's reaction to the stress of modern life, too much freedom and choice, religious fervor, masturbation, or excessive study. In their aggressive attempts to remake patients into proper gentlemen and ladies, the new asylums promoted cultural activities such as reading selected texts, theater performances and writing.

Most asylums housed males and females in approximately equal numbers; cultural activities for females stressed piety, fashion, and domestic activity while men could comment on politics, the temperance movement, and opposition to women's rights. Reiss refers to the French model of using cultural activities in asylums, f.ex., Philippe Pinel's staging of plays to educate patients, and Marquis de Sade's theater performances at Charenton. He ends with a discussion of patient narratives that depict some horrific abuses tolerated in nineteenth-century asylums; the degree of these abuses is familiar to us from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (see film annotation).

The work includes a few illustrations, the most important being an engraving from a painting by Tony Robert-Fleury titled: Pinel Freeing the Insane (1876). (Yale University). Philippe Pinel (1745-1826) was a French pioneer in the humane treatment of mentally ill patients. A Director of Bicêtre Hospital in Paris, he is depicted as a heroic physician, liberating, mostly female, patients there. However, scholars have shown that only 10 of the 270 patients were chained, and that Pinel '"accepted the traditional use of chains to restrain the violent insane as a matter of course"' (p. 160). Reiss's point is that the revolutionary nature of Pinel's treatment of the insane has been exaggerated.

View full annotation

Summary:

Subitled, Invisible Wounds of War. Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery, this monograph features 27 contributing researchers. Published by the RAND Corporation, it is funded by a grant from the Iraq Afghanistan Deployment Impact Fund. The study was conducted under the joint auspices of the Center for Military Health Policy Research, a RAND Health Center, and the Forces and Resources Policy Center of the National Security Research Division of the RAND Corporation.
 
The work deserves our full attention as it delineates and explains the economic, human, medical, political, public health, and social consequences of injuries suffered by returning veterans of US involvement in 8 years of continuous conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq. The introduction defines the three kinds of invisible wounds affecting thousands of the 1.64 million American troops deployed in Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq) since 2001. These combat related injuries are post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), major depression, and traumatic brain injury (TBI). Upwards of 26% of returning troops may have mental health concerns, including drug and alcohol dependency, homelessness, and suicide.

The monograph analyses numerous studies of these issues, both governmental and non-governmental, and RAND has conducted its own study. The data collection is recent: from April 2007 to January 2008. RAND estimates that approximately 300.000 persons currently suffer from PTSD or major depression; in addition, 320,000 veterans may have experienced TBI during deployment.

The recommendations include evidence based care at the VA level, the state and community level, and on site in Afghanistan and Iraq. Adequate care would pay for itself and save money in the long run by improving productivity and reducing medical and mortality costs for members of the US armed forces.

View full annotation

Summary:

Written by a psychiatrist and historian, American Melancholy: Constructions of Depression in the Twentieth Century looks at how culture, politics and, in particular, gender have played a role in the development of a diagnosis.  Hirshbein moves between several different worlds, showing how they intercalate and, indeed, are very much part of the same world: psychiatric nosology and cultural attitudes to the gendered expression of emotion and feelings, medication trials and magazine advice to women about how they should deal with the blues, the relations between treatment paradigms and how society views suffering.

View full annotation

Summary:

A memoir of raising a daughter with autism and an anthropological and historical investigation into autism around the world, Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism draws upon Grinker's own experiences, those of families of children with autism in the United States, Korea, India and South Africa, and a variety of experts and caregivers.  Putting the story of autism into a historical, anthropological, and personal context, the book deals with hot-button topics - the question of an autism epidemic, of etiology, of treatments - with a careful, patient approach.

View full annotation

Summary:

In this candid chronicle of what many would call a prolonged depression occasioned in part by her husband's illness and death, Norris, a popular memoirist and essayist, seeks carefully to distinguish the psychological or psycho-medical category of "depression" from the spiritual state of "acedia" or, more bluntly, "sloth," in its oldest and most precise sense.  In doing so she raises important questions about widespread and often imprecise use of categories derived from clinical psychology, an imprecision that may muddy the distinction between spiritual and psychopathological experience.

"Acedia" she defines as a failure of will, signifying a need for spiritual guidance and prayer, whereas "depression" requires medical treatment.  Going beyond the confessional, Norris suggests that acedia may be an endemic condition among middle-class Americans, over-busy but spiritually slothful.  The book is loosely organized, often characteristically lyrical, and more invitational than diagnostic.  Her purpose, finally, seems to be to inspire readers to embrace simple life-giving spiritual disciplines like reading the Psalms as a stay against excessive self-preoccupation and actual depression as well as spiritual depletion.  

View full annotation

Summary:

Originally delivered as a ten-hour lecture at a conference and subsequently partly published in various forms, The Animal That Therefore I Am has been collected in this one volume, also including a transcription of Derrida's extempore lecture, delivered at the end of the symposium, on the 'animal' and Heidegger. The Animal That Therefore I Am is a sustained meditation on the role of the 'animal' in philosophy.  Derrida questions the logic, the ethics, and the rhetorical and philosophical effects of establishing (or assuming) a boundary that seems to distinguish so clearly, so finally, and so permanently the human from the animal.

View full annotation

Summary:

The Work of Mourning is a collection of tributes, eulogies, essays, and funeral orations by a controversial philosopher, who was attacked as much for his enigmatic style (obscurantism, to some) as for his intellectual hubris (deconstructionism).  Some of those remembered in this book are equally famous philosophers - Foucault, Levinas, Barthes, Althusser - and others less so; this collection includes superb short biographical essays by Kas Saghafi that provide a foundation for Derrida's public expressions of grief on the death of his friends, teachers, and colleagues.

View full annotation