Books like The female malady by Elaine Showalter

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks follows the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells were taken in 1951 without her consent and later became the first immortal human cell line, HeLa, driving major scientific breakthroughs while raising questions of ethics, race, and medical exploitation.

A critical exploration of how societal roles and sexism shape the experience of female mental illness.

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.

Modern psychiatry is dominated by a biological medical understanding of mental disorder. But should we accept the conception of women this approach enshrines? Is it useful in dealing with mental distress or does it in fact act against women's interests? Denise Russell shows how the 'scientific' approach of contemporary psychiatry causes problems for women and develops an alternative perspective on mental distress. Women, Madness and Medicine looks at the roots of modern psychiatry, its theoretical approach to women, and what shifting trends in diagnosis tell us about its social underpinning. Arguing at both an epistemological and empirical level, Russell challenges the biological base of conditions such as schizophrenia, depression, premenstrual syndrome, anorexia and bulimia and female criminality. The work of women writers such as Phyllis Chesler, Luce Irigaray, Virginia Woolf and Janet Frame is examined in order to develop an alternative way of looking at problems of mental distress in women. This new approach attempts to dissolve the sanity/madness distinction using notions of oppression and repression and focusing on relations rather than individuals. This book will be of interest to undergraduates and graduates in women's studies, psychiatry, psychology, philosophy and sociology.

Explores the psychology of violent and criminal women from a psychodynamic and criminological rspective, also examining the link between childhood experience and adult behaviour. The book uses illustrative case material throughout.