Female Madness in Greek Tradition and Medicine

This paper considers the similarities and differences in Greek thought concerning female madness among both traditional views of madness and medical views. It identifies three broad types of female madness – Dionysian madness, most often associated with maenads and maenadism; desire-induced madness, associated with Aphrodite or Eros; and the medical views of madness of the Hippocratic Corpus, Plato, and other writers. Divinely-inspired madness was considered an assault on the individual from the outside, while the physicians considered madness to be an affliction from within. However, while desire-induced madness and medical madness were seen as the results of women avoiding men, Dionysian madness prompted women to leave male society. Finally, all three types of madness could be cured or ended through contact, often but not always sexual, with men

Why It Doesn’t Matter I’m Not Insane: Descartes’s Madness Doubt in Focus

Harry Frankfurt has argued that Descartes’s madness doubt in the First Meditation is importantly different from his dreaming doubt. The madness doubt does not provide a reason for doubting the senses since were the meditator to suppose he was mad his ability to successfully complete the philosophical investigation he sets for himself in the first few pages of the Meditations would be undermined. I argue that Frankfurt’s interpretation of Descartes’s madness doubt is mistaken and that it should be understood as playing the same role as his more famous dreaming doubt. I focus my discussion around four questions: (Q1) What does the meditator have in mind when speaking of madness?, (Q2) Why does the meditator so quickly dismiss the madness doubt but take seriously the dreaming doubt?, (Q3) Does the madness doubt have the same scope as the dreaming doubt?, and (Q4) Why does the meditator bring up the madness doubt at all

Madness in Southern China : illness as metaphor in Su Tong\u27s The tale of the siskins and Madwoman on the bridge

In Su Tong’s novels, the term madness is more than a medical term and it carries metaphorical meanings. In The Tale of the Siskins and “Madwoman on the Bridge,” Su Tong uses madness as a metaphor to challenge the dichotomy between normality and abnormality, and draws an analogy between mental hospitals and contemporary society. Unlike Yu Hua’s 余華 (1960-) novels, which intertwine sanguinary violence with madness, Su Tong depicts madness mainly to unveil the absurdity of the Mahogany Street. This paper analyses the use of patients’ illnesses in mental hospitals as metaphors in these two stories. In “Madwoman on the Bridge,” Su Tong displaces the role of doctors and madmen. In The Tale of the Siskins, Su Tong dismantles the clear-cut distinction between normality and abnormality. By reversing the two signifying concepts of normality and abnormality, Su Tong leads us to re-assess a variety of conventions, customs and acts we deem reasonable and legitimate in contemporary society

The Cowl - Special Midnight Madness Edition - 1989

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Special Midnight Madness Edition, 1989. 4 pages

MADNESS: A Multiresolution, Adaptive Numerical Environment for Scientific Simulation

MADNESS (multiresolution adaptive numerical environment for scientific simulation) is a high-level software environment for solving integral and differential equations in many dimensions that uses adaptive and fast harmonic analysis methods with guaranteed precision based on multiresolution analysis and separated representations. Underpinning the numerical capabilities is a powerful petascale parallel programming environment that aims to increase both programmer productivity and code scalability. This paper describes the features and capabilities of MADNESS and briefly discusses some current applications in chemistry and several areas of physics

The Cowl - Midnight Madness Issue - Oct 9, 1991

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Midnight Madness Issue - October 9, 1991. 4 pages

The ABC\u27s of Schizophrenia

SCHIZOPHRENIA GENESIS, THE ORIGINS OF MADNESS Irving I. Gottesman W.H. Freeman and Company, New York, 1991 296 pages, $14.95, paperbac

Madness decolonized?: Madness as transnational identity in Gail Hornstein’s Agnes’s Jacket

The US psychologist Gail Hornstein’s monograph Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness (2009) is an important intervention in the identity politics of the mad movement. Hornstein offers a resignified vision of mad identity that embroiders the central trope of an “anti-colonial” struggle to reclaim the experiential world “colonized” by psychiatry. A series of literal and figurative appeals make recourse to the inner world and (corresponding) cultural world of the mad, as well as to the ethno-symbolic cultural materials of dormant nationhood. This rhetoric is augmented by a model in which the mad comprise a diaspora without an origin, coalescing into a single transnational community. The mad are also depicted as persons displaced from their metaphorical homeland, the “inner” world “colonized” by the psychiatric regime. There are a number of difficulties with Hornstein’s rhetoric, however. Her “ethnicity-and-rights” response to the oppression of the mad is symptomatic of Western parochialism, while her proposed transmutation of putative psychopathology from limit upon identity to parameter of successful identity is open to contestation. Moreover, unless one accepts Hornstein’s porous vision of mad identity, her self-ascribed insider status in relation to the mad community may present a problematic “re-colonization” of mad experience

Borderline experience: madness, mimicry and Scottish gothic

This essay draws on Julia Kristeva's concept of 'borderline' experience, a feature of psychotic discourse, to examine the representation of madness, split personality and sociopathic behaviour in James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and the contemporary, muted Gothic of John Burnside's The Locust Room (2001). The main characteristics of borderline experience - a concern with authenticity and the proper name, with uncertain boundaries between inside and outside, truth and delusion - are central concerns in Hogg and Burnside, and the essay assesses the value of borderline discourse for a critical reading of madness in Gothic

"Now he walks and walks, as if he didn't have a home where he could eat": food, healing, and hunger in Quechua narratives of madness

In the Quechua-speaking peasant communities of southern Peru, mental disorder is understood less as individualized pathology and more as a disturbance in family and social relationships. For many Andeans, food and feeding are ontologically fundamental to such relationships. This paper uses data from interviews and participant observation in a rural province of Cuzco to explore the significance of food and hunger in local discussions of madness. Carers’ narratives, explanatory models, and theories of healing all draw heavily from idioms of food sharing and consumption in making sense of affliction, and these concepts structure understandings of madness that differ significantly from those assumed by formal mental health services. Greater awareness of the salience of these themes could strengthen the input of psychiatric and psychological care with this population and enhance knowledge of the alternative treatments that they use. Moreover, this case provides lessons for the global mental health movement on the importance of openness to the ways in which indigenous cultures may construct health, madness, and sociality. Such local meanings should be considered by mental health workers delivering services in order to provide care that can adjust to the alternative ontologies of sufferers and carers