Camisole: Not only a short light garment of soft delicate fabric worn by women when dressed in negligee for night or the bedroom, but also a straitjacket for lunatics in an asylum or criminals condemned to the guillotine.
One of the staggering things that Lisa Appignanesi says she discovered while doing research for her book Mad, Bad, and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors
"is that in 1800 or 1810, the head of Bedlam, the first great public mental health asylum in Britain had sixteen causes of mental illness, or thereabouts, and they were very general things, like misfortunes, troubles, grief, love, jealousy, pride, drink, intoxication, and -- I love this one, religion and Methodism. They were genuine causes. And now we have over 950 pages of very specific diagnoses, which seem to handle every aspect of lived experience, and a lot of them seem to have pharmaceuticals attributed to their potential cure. That's rather staggering ....
the mind-doctoring professions have really colonized our mental and emotional life, we have more and more things that are disordered, that are seen through those spectacles. We find more and more depression, where at one time we would have found unhappiness, or poverty, or any of a multitude of emotional and social problems. But we look to the mind doctors for their cures."
4 comments:
Loved the pictures of your previous post. Regarding mind disorders, it boggles MY mind to find so many diagnoses of unknown sicknesses like bi-polar and others that didn't exist in my time. As you say, before, some mind problems had to do with the pain and joy of everyday life. But, nowadays, everyone needs medication. The pharmaceutical companies are inventing diseases and mind disorders in order to sell more medicines and that's the bottom truth. Terrible. Hugs, M.
Indeed. All these poor folks who believe all the creations dreamed up to be cured by pharmaceuticals. I think it is so true that people are running away from feeling any low time or sorrow, as if emotions are bad. Only good ones count. Well, I know from experience that hard emotional struggles bring enlightenment. What if we don't go through struggles and self-searchings? If everything is peachy-keen all the time does one need to learn anything new?
I am reminded of my brother (the cardiologist) who told me once that medicine has not even penetrated the human mind and psychology is but at its infancy. I took it to say : We still don't know what the hell we are talking about!
taste of b, that is so true. hence my dismay/anger: why do some institutions and corporations have so much power to shape this warped thinking?
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