Books like Bedlam by Catharine Arnold

The Bell Jar is the sole novel by Sylvia Plath, a psychologically intense and autobiographical look at a young woman’s decline into mental illness.

Oliver Sacks explores the many faces of hallucination, weaving patient stories and his own psychedelic encounters to reveal how these visions illuminate brain function, culture, and the human experience.

Robert Burton explores human nature and emotion through the historical lens of melancholy, blending early medical, psychological, and literary insights into the experience of sadness.

This way madness lies traces the evolution of mental illness treatment from madhouses to modern psychiatric hospitals, showing how institutions shaped society’s view of mental health through historic archives and patient art.

An historical overview of privately owned mental health institutions in England and Wales between the seventeenth century and the 1970s. This in depth study combines historic reports, statistics, and other important artifacts to provide a clear picture of the successes and failures of such institutions. A number of manuscripts and historic plates are provided for reference in an extensive database of resources and their origins.

When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge Classique, few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world. This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition. History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined? Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hôpital Général in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud. The History of Madness is an inspiring and classic work that challenges us to understand madness, reason and power and the forces that shape them.