Examines the emergence of Brazilian psychiatry during a period of national regeneration, demonstrating how sociopolitical negotiations can shape psychiatric professionalization

The exact definition of "madness" remains elusive. There are difficulties in distinguishing the criminal from the mad or, more euphemistically, the mentally ill. Controversy has centered on the frightening potential possessed by the state to deprive of his rights the individual officially classified as mad. In this book, Wing, a psychiatrist of international repute, argues for a limited medical definition of mental illness, although he explains how even a doctor's professional judgment may often be influenced by social pressures. He compares concepts of madness prevalent in different types of society, examining, for example, the Marxist attitude towards the deviant in a socialist state. In a chapter which draws much from his own experience, he shows precisely how the apparatus of state medicine is used to suppress political dissidence in Russia. He also critically reviews the petty tyrannies prevalent in the West and tackles the difficult analytical problem of schizophrenia, a subject on which he is one of the most respected medical authorities. Reasoning about Madness is an original and important work in which the author successfully resists the temptation to erect "grand theories that explain nothing because they attempt to explain everything." Instead, he concentrates on developing a definition of madness which strikes a balance between the benefits of medical care and the preservation of human liberties.

The exact definition of "madness" remains elusive. There are difficulties in distinguishing the criminal from the mad or, more euphemistically, the mentally ill. Controversy has centered on the frightening potential possessed by the state to deprive of his rights the individual officially classified as mad. In this book, Wing, a psychiatrist of international repute, argues for a limited medical definition of mental illness, although he explains how even a doctor's professional judgment may often be influenced by social pressures. He compares concepts of madness prevalent in different types of society, examining, for example, the Marxist attitude towards the deviant in a socialist state. In a chapter which draws much from his own experience, he shows precisely how the apparatus of state medicine is used to suppress political dissidence in Russia. He also critically reviews the petty tyrannies prevalent in the West and tackles the difficult analytical problem of schizophrenia, a subject on which he is one of the most respected medical authorities. Reasoning about Madness is an original and important work in which the author successfully resists the temptation to erect "grand theories that explain nothing because they attempt to explain everything." Instead, he concentrates on developing a definition of madness which strikes a balance between the benefits of medical care and the preservation of human liberties.

Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 - from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the "insane" and the rest of humanity.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Updated with a new afterword "An excellent take on the lunacy affecting much of the world today. Douglas is one of the bright lights that could lead us out of the darkness." – Joe Rogan "Douglas Murray fights the good fight for freedom of speech ... A truthful look at today's most divisive issues" – Jordan B. Peterson Are we living through the great derangement of our times? In The Madness of Crowds Douglas Murray investigates the dangers of 'woke' culture and the rise of identity politics. In lively, razor-sharp prose he examines the most controversial issues of our moment: sexuality, gender, technology and race, with interludes on the Marxist foundations of 'wokeness', the impact of tech and how, in an increasingly online culture, we must relearn the ability to forgive. One of the few writers who dares to counter the prevailing view and question the dramatic changes in our society – from gender reassignment for children to the impact of transgender rights on women – Murray's penetrating book, now published with a new afterword taking account of the book's reception and responding to the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests, clears a path of sanity through the fog of our modern predicament.

Many human beings have considered the powers and the limits of human knowledge, but few have wondered about the power that the idea of knowledge has over us. The Madness of Knowledge is the first book to investigate this emotional inner life of knowledge – the lusts, fantasies, dreams and fears that the idea of knowing provokes. There are in-depth discussions of the imperious will to know, of Freud’s epistemophilia, or love of knowledge, and the curiously insistent links between madness, magical thinking and the desire for knowledge. Steven Connor also probes secrets and revelations, quarreling and the history of quizzes and ‘general knowledge’, charlatanry and pretension, both the violent disdain and the sanctification of the stupid, as well as the emotional investment in the spaces and places of knowledge, from the study to the library. In an age of artificial intelligence, alternative facts and mistrust of truth, The Madness of Knowledge offers an opulent, enlarging and sometimes unnerving psychopathology of intellectual life.

The philosophy of psychosis and the psychosis of philosophy: a philosopher draws on his experience of madness. In this book, philosopher and linguist Wouter Kusters examines the philosophy of psychosis—and the psychosis of philosophy. By analyzing the experience of psychosis in philosophical terms, Kusters not only emancipates the experience of the psychotic from medical classification, he also emancipates the philosopher from the narrowness of textbooks and academia, allowing philosophers to engage in real-life praxis, philosophy in vivo. Philosophy and madness—Kusters's preferred, non-medicalized term—coexist, one mirroring the other. Kusters draws on his own experience of madness—two episodes of psychosis, twenty years apart—as well as other first-person narratives of psychosis. Speculating about the maddening effect of certain words and thought, he argues, and demonstrates, that the steady flow of philosophical deliberation may sweep one into a full-blown acute psychotic episode. Indeed, a certain kind of philosophizing may result in confusion, paradoxes, unworldly insights, and circular frozenness reminiscent of madness. Psychosis presents itself to the psychotic as an inescapable truth and reality. Kusters evokes the mad person's philosophical or existential amazement at reality, thinking, time, and space, drawing on classic autobiographical accounts of psychoses by Antonin Artaud, Daniel Schreber, and others, as well as the work of phenomenological psychiatrists and psychologists and such phenomenologists as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He considers the philosophical mystic and the mystical philosopher, tracing the mad undercurrent in the Husserlian philosophy of time; visits the cloud castles of mystical madness, encountering LSD devotees, philosophers, theologians, and nihilists; and, falling to earth, finds anxiety, emptiness, delusions, and hallucinations. Madness and philosophy proceed and converge toward a single vanishing point.