Confined in a small space for months on end, subject to ship's discipline and living on limited food supplies, many sailors of old lost their minds – and no wonder. Many still do. The result in some instances was bloodthirsty mutinies, such as the whaleboat Sharon whose captain was butchered and fed to the ship's pigs in a crazed attack in the Pacific. Or mob violence, such as the 147 survivors on the raft of the Medusa, who slaughtered each other in a two-week orgy of violence. So serious was the problem that the Royal Navy's own physician claimed sailors were seven times more likely to go mad than the rest of the population. Historic figures such as Christopher Columbus, George Vancouver, Fletcher Christian (leader of the munity of the Bounty) and Robert FitzRoy (founder of the Met Office) have all had their sanity questioned. More recently, sailors in today's round-the-world races often experience disturbing hallucinations, including seeing elephants floating in the sea and strangers taking the helm, or suffer complete psychological breakdown, like Donald Crowhurst. Others become hypnotised by the sea and jump to their deaths. Off the Deep End looks at the sea's physical character, how it confuses our senses and makes rational thought difficult. It explores the long history of madness at sea and how that is echoed in many of today's yacht races. It looks at the often-marginal behaviour of sailors living both figuratively and literally outside society's usual rules. And it also looks at the sea's power to heal, as well as cause, madness.

The author of Clinical Lessons on Life and Madness: Dostoevsky’s Characters draws on Dostoevsky's universe to illuminate psychoanalytic theory and practice. Using Dostoevsky’s characters as case studies, the author discusses the various psychoanalytic concepts they embody, and shows how these insights can be applied to therapeutic understanding. By considering the people who populate Dostoevsky’s world as personifying a whole spectrum of human possibilities and modes of relation, Heitor O'Dwyer de Macedo’s discussion of the characters – including those from Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov – allows him to explore fundamental issues constitutive of clinical practice, such as trauma, fantasy, perversion and madness. Clinical Lessons on Life and Madness will provide an important resource for psychoanalysts with an interest in literature, as well as students of literature seeking a psychoanalytic interpretation.

Since the time of Hippocrates, madness has typically been viewed through the lens of disease, dysfunction, and defect. In Madness, philosopher of science Justin Garson presents a radically different paradigm for conceiving of madness and the forms that it takes. In this paradigm, which he calls madness-as-strategy, madness is neither a disease nor a defect, but a designed feature, like the heart or lungs. The book will be essential reading for philosophers of medicine and psychiatry, historians and sociologists of medicine, and mental health service users, survivors, and activists, for its alternative and liberating vision of what it means to be mad.

New York Times bestselling author John Eldredge guides readers through a simple daily practice that will help them find the connection to God and small moments of peace during busy days that they crave. We live in world filled with endless distractions, a news cycle that never takes a break, and the constant demands of daily life such as work, family, friends, and community. Most people find themselves feeling like there's no margin, no time to sit and reflect on what matters most or connect with God, and even though they desperately crave a few minutes of peace, they don't know how to slow down or change course. John Eldredge has seen and felt the toll that constant busyness has, and he created the wildly successful One Minute Pause app that 180,000 users have a described as a "rescue" during difficult times. Now, in The One Minute Pause Journal, he goes a step further and helps readers begin a daily habit of intentional stopping and reflecting that has the potential to change the course of their lives and their relationship with their heavenly Father. This ninety-day guided journal includes an extended introduction that will help explain the practice, both theologically and practically, so that readers can get the most out of the experience and truly understand how it works. Each entry features a regular set of morning and evening prompts, scripture, prayers, and journaling space that will encourage readers to release everything to God and restore their union with him; give guidance on how to invite God more fully into our lives; and provide space to reflect on daily life and prioritize what matters most. The One Minute Pause Journal offers a simple daily practice that will help readers connect with God and find those small moments to reflect and relax.

Madness and Cinema offers a radical approach to the issue of what happens when we watch films. By exploring cinema's relationship to meaning and proposing new ways to read cinema through psychoanalysis, this book develops the idea that the spectator engages in what has previously been described as an act of madness. By considering some of the key concepts from Freud and Lacan, as well as ideas from Derrida and Foucault, we are shown the common features that cinema and madness share. The film spectator is shown as the psychotic, neurotic and hysteric, as the book examines the ways in which the foundations of culture and meaning are challenged when we become the spectator of a film.

This book builds on Robert Jay Lifton's theory of psychic numbing, and takes madness as a guiding metaphor. It shows that public perceptions of the Bomb are a kaleidoscope of ever-changing ideas and images. Recent changes in public awareness only signal new symptoms of this public madness, symptoms unwittingly fostered by the antinuclear movement. Since the newest nuclear images follow the same psychological pattern as their predecessors, they are likely to lead us deeper into nuclear madness. Chernus offers new interpretations of four major theorists int the psychology of religion—Paul Tillich, R.D. Laing, Mircea Eliade, and James Hillman—to trace the roots of nuclear madness back to the onset of modernity, when the West gained technological mastery at the price of losing religious imagination and ontological security. The author develops an interpretation of Lifton's own thought as an ontological and religious psychology. Drawing on the work of Eliade and Hillman, he goes on to suggest that madness reflects a repressed desire to transform life by opening up the floodgates of imagination. A conscious cultivation of the play of imagination can lead the way through madness to sanity and peace. But, imagination can only respond to the nuclear threat if it is acted out in a new brand of peace activism that blends pragmatic politics with psychological and religious transformation.