APR - Mad, Bad & Sad

April review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2016: Mad, Bad & Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors by Lisa Appignaensi, 2009. [Psychology (non-fiction) category]

My selection for Psychology (non-fiction) was Mad, Bad & Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors, a book about the last two hundred years' worth of "extreme states of mind" in women. It chronicled the way women have been diagnosed over the years and evaluated the gradual shift in societal perspectives on these unusual women. Beginning in the 1800s, Mad, Bad & Sad tracks the inception of female mental illness and institutionalization as a sort of storage term to remove unruly women from their families purview. There is a lot of name-dropping, making sure to cover the "greats" like Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe and Zelda Fitzgerald, and it is here that the tone of the book seems to shift, organizing itself more around these cases rather than the societal views that the beginning of the book dealt with. The book was written in 2009, so there is a bit of a contemporary gap that I would be very interested in seeing Appignanensi deal with, but alas. 

I have long been enamored of both Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, two tragic writer women who figured prominently in the more contemporary chapters of this book. I cannot say exactly what it is that draws me to these women--it is surely not any sort of personal connection to such oceans of sadness or dejected kinship, other than my love of words and the way these women used them. (This is not to say that I have never been Sad with a capital S, I suppose, but it is not the primary focus of my love for these writers--I do not love them because they ended their lives in tragedy, I guess is what I'm trying to say.) I was introduced to both women in high school, under the tutelage one of my favorite teachers, my AP Lit teacher Mrs. Culver. Virginia intrigued me because of her breakthrough stream-of-consciousness style, one that I tried to emulate in my journal for so many years. Sylvia's rawness in poetry electrified me, and The Bell Jar made me wonder about what my future held, as a senior in high school on the cusp of The Real World. It has been said that all the great artists are great because they have experienced sadness and pain in a way that rips through their art, and these two women certainly felt their share of sadness. The lapis-colored lens of their lives has more than once prompted me to look at my own experiences and be grateful that I have never been that Sad, but it has also showed me the ways in which such Sadness is relative, a fact that I was reminded of reading this book. 

My overall feelings about the book were those of intellectual intrigue. It was a long haul, and I trekked with this book to Italy and back, reading a little bit every day, whenever I could. It was thick with information, facts and anecdotes and tidbits, not always easily consumable in short bursts (sometimes I had to re-read), but I did my best.  I liked the way it moved through history, moving through different women and diagnoses. I wanted to be a history major for a time, but I had trouble in history classes; memorizing names and dates and disparate facts has never been how my brain processes information, so in a way, Mad, Bad & Sad humanized the history for me, presented me with fully-fleshed stories rather than bare-bones timelines. I am sure I should read this book again in order to retain the plethora of information that I was presented, as I must do with most dense information of this nature, and I look forward to it.