Concept Of Madness Research Articles

Bacchic Batman?: Batman: Killing Time and Euripides’ Bacchae

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the ways that Tom King’s Batman: Killing Time (2022) blends a telling of Euripides’ Bacchae with the more traditional story of a super-villain bank heist. The heist mobilises characters such as Catwoman and the Riddler against Batman as they try to secure possession of an ancient artefact. This artefact turns out to have ancient Greek provenance and allows King to emphasise how his tale evokes and responds to Euripides’ play. By quoting extensively from the Bacchae and interspersing scenes from the play that resonate with the action in and around Gotham City, King makes the actions of Batman and the supervillains embody the tenets of Classical reception. The shifting interpretations of the characters and the various representations of the ancient artefact reflect the ways that individual readers come to understand a literary or artistic work. The conflict over the artefact mirrors critics’ conflicting interpretations of a text, and Killing Time can be seen as a large-scale interpretation of Euripides’ tragedy. This sequential graphic narrative acts as a creative response to Euripides’ Bacchae and questions that play’s conception of madness, reason, sight, and insight, while fruitfully putting into dialogue the myths of ancient Greece with those of the DC Universe.

The Sociality of Madness: Hegel on Spirit's Pathology and the Sanity of Ethicality

Abstract Despite a profound concern for the epistemological, ontological and ethical conditions for being-at-home-in-the-world, G.W.F. Hegel published very little on a particularly serious threat to being-at-home: mental illness and disorder. The chief exception is found in Hegel's Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830). In this work, Hegel briefly provides an ontology of madness (Verrücktheit), wherein madness consists in the inward collapsing of subjectivity and objectivity into the individual's unconscious and primordial feeling soul. While there has been an increasing number of studies on Hegel's conception of madness, I propose that there is another overlooked way to understand madness in Hegel's system: as social pathology. I argue in this article that Hegel offers a compelling social account of madness in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), which arises at the elevated, self-reflective and community level of spirit. This sociality of madness, as I call it, occurs when spirit is unable to reconcile two contradictory yet equally essential aspects of its reality, resulting in spirit's structural homelessness. I argue that by examining this overlooked sociality of madness, we may read Hegel's political-philosophical project in a new light: on the one hand, the ethical life (Sittlichkeit) presented in the Philosophy of Right (1821) becomes understood as a political therapeutic. On the other hand, if the ethical life fails to live up to the demand of being an adequate spiritual therapeutic, then the traditional reading of the Philosophy of Right as a reconciliatory hermeneutic becomes problematized, opening up new avenues for the proliferation of social pathology.

Kant’s concept of madness, psychiatry and anti-psychiatry

Critics of psychiatry (or “anti-psychiatrists”) such as philosopher Michel Foucault, sociologist Erving Goffman and physician Ronald David Laing tend to view psychiatry as a form of social control, one of the state institutions of oppression. The concept of “norm” in relation to mental health is understood as culturally conditioned. Psychiatry is used to isolate and “stigmatise” the carriers of non-normative rationality, individuals with different states of mind and patterns of behaviour. Kant has no objections to the practice of forced treatment of the insane, assuming they are declared incompetent. At the same time, Kant considers it necessary to entrust the very procedure of declaring a person incompetent not to medical professionals, but to philosophers. This is due to the fact that Kant sees mental illness as a breakdown, a weakness in cognitive abilities. Kant shares the modernist ideal of a single normative rationality, which is the basis of moral abilities and a guarantee of personal autonomy. In contrast, anti-psychiatry proceeds from the postmodern idea of the diversity of forms of rationality, or refuses entirely to evaluate reason (sanity) as an essential attribute of human nature, thereby justifying the irrational and non-rational aspects of human existence. From this perspective, insane people appear as stigmatised carriers of alternative, non-normative rationality. Accordingly, such people should be protected from any medical coercion, because doctors, when making their decisions, proceed from culturally conditioned criteria of rationality and from a very relative and changing psychiatric norm.

Por uma formação antimanicomial na rua: telas, saberes, culturas e cuidado

The process of psychiatric reform underway in Brazil has as one of its objectives to promote social transformations regarding the conception of madness. This narrative is report of the experience of a meeting of students, professionals from the healthcare network and from the university, made possible by the Education Program for Work in Health (PET-Saúde), in a Psychosocial Care Center for the care of people with troubling drug use, of the Brazilian National Health System (SUS). The proposal to think of the street, the culture, as a place of education also enables the enrollment of students in another social dimension, which causes displacements in traditional education. Culture is a powerful resource for inclusion. However, in order for cultural actions to be educational instruments in Mental Health and social inclusion strategies, the activities need to take place in the city’s spaces.

INVESTIGATION OF CRIMINAL LAW FOR CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF PSYCHOTIC AND NEUROTIC MENTAL DISORDERS IN IRAN

A person with a mental disorder can become an ordinary citizen or a criminal at some point in their lives. In the words of the Iranian legislators, free people and people with disabilities who committed a crime; They are considered guilty but irresponsible. One of the important issues in criminal law is the determination of criminal responsibility. The perpetrator of the crime can be attributed to the perpetrator and will be punished according to the crime unless the offender is unable to bear criminal responsibility for some reason. A person commits a crime under the influence of disorders of which he is unaware of the process. In the present study, with an analytical study, we will comparatively study the issue that; Mental disorders have a wide range that in some cases makes the person irresponsible and in some cases makes the person partially responsible and in other cases does not affect the criminal punishment of the person. Also, the difference between the madness mentioned in Article 51 of the Islamic Penal Code is different from the concept of madness considered by psychiatrists, and in the legislation, it only refers to the degrees of madness and does not deal with the types of madness.

Reframing Madness with Avant-Garde Film: Lina Mangiacapre’s Feminist Collaboration at the Asylum

ABSTRACT This article addresses Lina Mangiacapre's avant-garde feminist filmography, a body of work that, despite recent growth in Italian feminist film studies, remains a neglected area of study. Specifically, the article investigates Mangiacapre's avant-garde featurette Follia come poesia (1979), the fruit of her two-year occupation of the local Frullone Asylum and artistic collaboration with the institutionalised women there. After situating Mangiacapre within the larger Italian radical psychiatry movement, the article distinguishes her subversive feminist theory and praxis from more mainstream sexual difference theory. Through a critical analysis of Follia come poesia, the article argues that Mangiacapre reframes the concept of madness as more than to-be-cured-ness through cinematography, editing, and sound. It concludes that through cinematic prowess, Mangiacapre provides an audiovisual exhibition of her subversive theory, interrogates conventions surrounding madness, foregrounds the individuality of each incarcerated woman, and constructs a representation of the institutionalised as active, mobile, creative subjects.

“Stark Raving Sane”: A Deconstructionist Reading of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

The focus of this study is the theme of Hamlet’s madness in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which as a play based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, provides a critique on this theme through the perspective of Ros and Guil, who, by means of a reversal of minor and major characters, have become the center of the spotlight in Stoppard’s play. The concept of madness in general is complicated, including many different aspects, among which the historical aspect is the most significant, as the definition of madness has evolved through different historical eras. By placing Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in a historical context, this essay aims to demonstrate that as a play written in the latter half of the twentieth century, Ros and Guil’s critique of Hamlet’s madness, with all the intricacies of its language, collapses the binary opposition of sanity and insanity in a twentieth century poststructuralist manner, and leads to no clear-cut answer to the question of Hamlet’s madness. However, as a play whose events unfold in the context of Hamlet, a Renaissance play, it carries some of the social and political aspects of Shakespeare’splay, as Ros and Guil’s evaluation of Hamlet’s condition is heavily under Claudius’s politically infused influence.

Memórias e representações do “medo da loucura” no meio de médicos e médicas psiquiátricas

Este artigo tem como objetivo apresentar os resultados da pesquisa sobre memórias sociais e coletivas construídas por médicos e médicas psiquiatras acerca da visão do louco e da loucura, tomando como base as contribuições da Teoria da Memória e as contribuições da Teoria das Representações Sociais. Aplicamos entrevistas semiestruturadas a 10 médicos (as) que trabalharam ou trabalham com o enfermo psiquiátrico, por dois anos ou mais, e desenvolveram a maior parte de suas atividades profissionais na cidade de Vitória da Conquista – Bahia. No trabalho, pontuamos o percurso das representações sociais coletivo-individuais que foram sendo construídas por esses profissionais. Como resultado, observamos que os entrevistados (as) mobilizam uma representação da memória do medo do “louco” e da “loucura” no seio das relações familiares, dos mais próximos, uma memória individual-coletiva resultante das experiências vividas por eles (as), bem como por seus pares e referências da psiquiatria para construir a narrativa de si e de sua profissão no que se refere à compreensão do significado do medo do “louco” e da “loucura”.

The Politics of Madness and Spirit Possession in Northern India

ABSTRACT Being a medium of a god is common and normative in the Western Himalayas. In this article I present a case of three mediums who were regarded with mixed feelings by society, because their mediumship strongly criticized religious practices and the caste system. The villagers in the study area have cultural-religious practices that help them cope with deviant forms of mediumship – patterns such as ignoring a person or gossiping about them to express skepticism or to label the possession as inauthentic. These approaches were not effective in these cases. As a result, the biomedical concept of madness was invoked by some members of the community to put an end to what they regarded as deviant mediumship.

Madness and spiritualist philosophy of mind: Maine de Biran and A. A. Royer-Collard on a ‘true dualism’

ABSTRACT The exchange between the philosopher Pierre Maine de Biran and the psychiatrist Antoine-Athanase Royer-Collard has been read either as an exemplary case of the influence of philosophy on medicine or as a “dialogue of the deaf” (Braunstein, Broussais et le matérialisme, 47). However, these two readings imply a clear distribution of roles between the philosopher and the doctor. This article instead examines the metaphysical nature of the discussion between the two spiritualists in their aim to establish a ‘true spiritualism’ from a common problem: the nature of madness. Based on a constellation analysis of Biran’s Nouvelles considérations sur les rapports du Physique et du Moral and Royer-Collard’s 1821 lecture on this manuscript, the article shows that both thinkers are concerned with the most appropriate form of dualism, and how it is possible to establish a relationship between the two fundamental aspects of man – the physical and moral – without denaturing each of them. Paradoxically, the analysis makes manifest a reversal of roles: whereas Biran has a static conception of dualism leading to an organic conception of madness, Royer-Collard demands a dynamic dualism that makes it possible to conceive a causal role for the mind in madness.

В «мрачном» и «таинственном» мире произведений Михаила Елизарова (безумие и «черная магия» в повести Ногти)

Mikhail Elizarov (born 1973 in Ukraine) undoubtedly belongs to the most “bizarre” and controversial contemporary Russian writers (more precisely, he is a Russian and Ukrainian writer). Elizarov is also known as a musician and a songwriter. He is the winner of literary award The Russian Booker Prize (in 2008) for his novel The Librarian (this novel was called one of the most controversial prize-winning novels). Elizarov’s literary works “balance” on the verge of postmodernist and realistic practice; the writer is known for scandalous but intellectual high-energy prose (sometimes he is compared to Nikolai Gogol, sometimes – to Vladimir Sorokin). The purpose of this article is to show and discuss distinguishing features of Elizarov’s prose, to identify central motifs and themes in his selected literary works. The story Fingernails is analyzed in this paper. Special attention is paid to Elizarov’s conception of madness and abnormality, and also to his point of view on relationship between “normal” and “abnormal” (strange, different from what is usual or expected).

"Making windows where there were once walls": Transformation in higher education curricula

As the events across South African campuses in 2015 and 2016 have shown, if there are any meaningful insights into quality and transformation, lessons could be learned from conceptions of madness. The intention is to examine curriculum transformation in South Africa and whether there are lessons to be drawn from other post-colonial environments’ experiences. In order to interrogate curriculum transformation, a shared understanding of the purpose of higher education especially in relation to its transformative potential and value needs to be established. As part of this exploration, how the curriculum has become a key focus area in the pursuit of a transformation agenda will be discussed. Given the perceived centrality of the curriculum, the role of the state in setting and supporting the transformation agenda is examined, as are the components of the system that either drives or inhibits the achievement of effective curriculum transformation.

Metaphors of Madness: Sylvia Plath’s Rejection of Patriarchal Language in The Bell Jar

Throughout history, the concept of madness has been linked to women and defined by men. Traditionally, female madness has been viewed as the result of the woman’s fragile constitution. Even when psychiatrists began to examine their patients’ situations, the woman’s place remained that of patient, and the man’s that of doctor. Furthermore, because the creative realm belonged to men, creative or intellectual women were viewed as somehow defective. Therefore, when female writers began to illustrate female madness as a result of external circumstances, they had to do so using the language of men. In her works, Sylvia Plath shows her awareness of patriarchal oppression and, in The Bell Jar, displays an understanding of madness as a social construction. The Bell Jar depicts Esther Greenwood’s madness as the result of an inability to reconcile dominant notions of the feminine with her creativity and, while Plath draws on contemporary metaphors to depict Esther’s psychic deterioration, she also creates new metaphors. In this article, I argue that Plath creates new vocabularies of madness to depict female madness as the result of patriarchal oppression; I suggest that these vocabularies are also an attempt to reject representations of madness that have been constructed and expressed in patriarchal language.

Loucura e Historicidade: Perspectivas Bioéticas

O presente artigo examina, sob o enfoque da Bioética, o tema da loucura. Este trabalho tem como objetivo analisar filosoficamente a historicidade da concepção da loucura, os consequentes tratamentos tradicionalmente utilizados para seu enfrentamento e os elementos constituintes do conceito de normalidade. Para isso, com a ajuda de uma revisão de literatura, é traçado um breve percurso histórico de como a loucura foi definida e tratada desde a Idade Média até a atualidade. Assim, a perspectiva religiosa medieval é considerada, bem como as modernas tendências racionalistas e empiristas sobre o tema. Seguindo tal percurso, chega-se à contemporaneidade com suas duas principais concepções sobre a loucura: doença ou fenômeno cultural. Destarte, indicando tendências teóricas acerca do fenômeno da loucura, busca-se auxiliar sua melhor compreensão, diagnóstico e correspondente tomada de decisão terapêutica, contribuindo para tornar a prática clínica mais eficaz em seu propósito de aliviar ou curar distúrbios e promover saúde psíquica aos que a ela recorrem.

“De volta à cidade, sr. cidadão!” - reforma psiquiátrica e participação social: do isolamento institucional ao movimento antimanicomial

Resumo O modelo manicomial produziu a exclusão da loucura da vida social, fundado no princípio do isolamento terapêutico, que gerou a institucionalização do louco e sua retirada da cidade e do direito à participação social, com a perda do direito à cidade e da condição de cidadania. Atualmente, a reforma psiquiátrica no Brasil é um dos mais importantes processos de crítica à psiquiatrização da loucura, promovendo uma desconstrução das formas de exclusão social da loucura e o debate na sociedade acerca dos direitos e da cidadania dos sujeitos em sofrimento mental e vulnerabilidade social. Diversas frentes inovadoras, de inclusão pelo trabalho, pela arte-cultura, pela militância política e de ocupação da cidade, têm configurado novas possibilidades de vida e expressão para os sujeitos, numa nova concepção sobre a loucura e a diferença, na qual os sujeitos da diversidade têm direito à cidade e à participação social.

‘Obsessed by the Obscenity of War’: Emotional and Physical Wounds in Mary Borden’s Poetry and Lesley Smith’s Four Years Out of Life

This article discusses the traumatic nature of war nursing represented in two poems by Mary Borden written to her lover during the time she nursed in France, and in Lesley Smith’s memoir, Four Years out of Life (1931). Both writers draw on their medical environment for metaphors to articulate the psychological trauma of their work. In both instances, their representation of fragmented bodies and minds reflects the nurse’s inability to impose control, the nursing ideal of containment, over her environment or over her emotional response to it. More specifically, Borden uses images of fragmented bodies and the sepsis of wounds as metaphors for the nurse persona’s psychological fragmentation and ‘infection’ by her terribly wounded patients. For Lesley Smith the concept of madness allows her to explore the inescapability of the war nursing experience which permeates her mind, especially its post-war persistence which looks ahead to much later definitions of post-traumatic stress.

Unsettling the Japanese Peruvian Legacy of Suffering: Madman in Augusto Higa Oshiro’s “Polvo enamorado”

Augusto Higa Oshiro’s 2013 short story “Polvo enamorado” depicts the experience and behavior of Kinshiro Nagatani, a Japanese immigrant who lives through during the time of the Peruvian government’s anti-Japanese operations in the 1930s and 1940s. However, Kinshiro’s experience with discrimination is not limited to that from the Peruvian society at large, but, more immediately, from the Japanese immigrant community itself, which labels him a madman as his behavior is deemed by them to be socially and morally unacceptable. Drawing on Foucauldian concepts of madness and limit-experiences, which delineate the processes of the construction and isolation of madmen in society, this article first examines how Kinshiro comes into existence as a madman and how his existence is confined to a space of exclusion. Then, it explores how and why the revelation of the processes of his becoming mad serves to offer an alternative view that disturbs the Japanese Peruvians’ prevailing collective memory of suffering and injustice.

Concepts of madness in diverse settings: a qualitative study from the INTREPID project.

BackgroundIn order to facilitate case identification of incident (untreated and recent onset) cases of psychosis and controls in three sites in India, Nigeria and Trinidad, we sought to understand how psychoses (or madness) were conceptualized locally. The evidence we gathered also contributes to a long history of research on concepts of madness in diverse settings.MethodsWe conducted focus group discussions and individual interviews to collect information about how informants in each site make sense of and respond to madness. A coding framework was developed and analyses of transcripts from the FGDs and interviews were conducted.ResultsAnalyses suggest the following: a) disturbed behaviors are the primary sign of madness; b) madness is attributed to a wide range of causes; and, c) responses to madness are dictated by cultural and pragmatic factors. These findings are congruent with similar research that has been conducted over the past 50 years.ConclusionsThe INTREPID research suggests that concepts about madness share similar features across diverse settings: a) terms for madness are often derived from a common understanding that involves disruptions in mental processes and capacities; b) madness is recognized mostly by disruptive behaviours or marked declines in functioning; c) causal attributions are varied; and, d) help-seeking is a complex process.

Jack Kerouac Revisited: "Madness" in On the Road Between Stigma and Glorification.

On the Road is a classic American novel that appeared at a time of great political, cultural, and psychiatric upheaval. Published almost 60 years ago, it still exerts great influence. We propose that the affirmative approach toward "madness" in the novel can enlighten our understanding of alternative perceptions of mental illness. The novel is analyzed with quantifying and narrative methods focusing on the concept of madness, which is a prominent theme in the novel. Stigma and glorification of madness can be found throughout the text. The positive sides and the pitfalls of an overly positive attitude toward mental illness and minority group members are discussed, including benevolent discrimination, recovery, and positive psychiatry.

El legado islámico en los cuidados psiquiátricos. El Maristán de Granada

During the Middle Ages, Muslims influenced significantly in the health sciences, initiating a process of clumping of existing knowledge and the inclusion of new contributions. The aim of this article is to contextualize the conception of madness and care realised in medieval Islamic culture and to analize the structure and organization of the Maristan of Granada, main health sanitary institution of al-Andalus and founded in 1367 by the emir Muhammad V. In order to get as much relevant data available to provide details of the enriched Arab-Islamic society of the Middle Ages vision, various historical documents and other literature sources they were examined. The findings of this review show the importance of Bimaristan of Granada as a promoter of health quality care to psychiatric patients in the Iberian Peninsula, including dietary-based therapies, hydrotherapy, massage, bloodletting and drug prescriptions. Decent and honorable treatment of the psychiatric patients would be imitated by some Christian psychiatric institutions in the peninsula since the 15th century.