New Book: The Madness of Women: Myth and Experience

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Jane Ussher (Reproductive and Sexual Mental Health research team co-leader at Centre for the Study of Gender, Social Inequities and Mental Health) releases her new book March 25th, 2011.

The Madness of Women: Myth and Experience explores a number of important, though often unasked questions. Why are women more likely to be diagnosed as mad than men? If madness is a gendered label, as many feminist critics would argue, how can we better understand and explain women's prolonged misery and distress? Can we prevent or treat this distress in a way that doesn't pathologize women?
 
Jane Ussher presents a critical multifactorial analysis of women's madness that both addresses the notion that madness is a myth, and acknowledges the reality and causes of women's distress. Topics include:

• The genealogy of women’s madness
• Incarceration of difficult or deviant women
• Regulation through treatment
• Deconstructing depression, PMS and borderline personality disorder
• Madness as a reasonable response to objectification and sexual violence
• Women’s narratives of resistance 

Drawing on academic and clinical experience, including case studies and in-depth interviews, as well as on the now extensive critical literature in the field of mental health, Ussher reveals the ways in which medicine, psychology, and drug company advertising combine to position women as ‘mad’. Rejecting this process of pathologisation, she posits women's distress may be a reasonable response to the conditions of their lives. Exploring the construction and lived experience of women’s madness, as well as survival and resistance, the implications of this research for women are vast.

For more information on the Centre for the Study of Gender, Social Inequities and Mental Health, visit their website.