Review of Madness: An American History of Mental Illness and Its Treatment by Mary de Young

…throughout history the line between sanity and madness often has been negotiable, and more often than not has been inscribed by gender, race, socioeconomic class and sexual orientation. (26)

The sociologist Mary de Young has written a lucid, literary, extremely approachable history of mental illness in America, paying close attention, as the above quotation indicates, to the social context as well as the medical. If such a history can be 'enjoyable' then this is it; the reader is taken through the definition of madness, the experience of it through narrations and pathographies, or first person accounts, and how it was viewed, handled and treated through colonial days to the present. She describes and explains asylums, the patients who inhabited them, and the treatments to which they were subjected over the centuries, from the humoural approach of the ancients to electroconvulsive therapy, surgeries (of body and brain), and of course psychopharmacology.

Review continued at Metapsychology Online Reviews.