Category Archives: United States

The Maddening of America

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The relative global decline of the United States has become a frequent topic of debate in recent years. Proponents of the post-American view point to the 2008 financial crisis, the prolonged recession that followed, and China’s steady rise. Most are international-relations experts who, viewing geopolitics through the lens of economic competitiveness, imagine the global order as a seesaw, in which one player’s rise necessarily implies another’s fall.

But the exclusive focus on economic indicators has prevented consideration of the geopolitical implications of a US domestic trend that is also frequently discussed, but by a separate group of experts: America’s ever-increasing rates of severe mental disease (which have already been very high for a long time).

The claim that the spread of severe mental illness has reached “epidemic” proportions has been heard so often that, like any commonplace, it has lost its ability to shock. But the repercussions for international politics of the disabling conditions diagnosed as manic-depressive illnesses (including major unipolar depression) and schizophrenia could not be more serious.–Liah Greenfeld

Shakespeare and Mental Illness

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Alan A. Stone, Touroff-Glueck Professor of Law and Psychiatry in the faculty of law and the faculty of medicine at Harvard University, in Psychiatric Times, March 12, 2013:

The ancient Greek dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides gave Western civilization its foundational myths: Prometheus, Oedipus, Antigone, and the Oresteia. Two thousand years passed until Shakespeare arrived and, according to literary critics, achieved something perhaps more important: he “invented the human!”1 I think of this invention as the secular conception of the human condition. Yes secular! it is a vision of the moral adventure of life constrained by no religious orthodoxy.

Scholars debate whether Shakespeare was Catholic or Protestant. He often draws on both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, but God is missing from his greatest plays. Nonetheless, to paraphrase Simon Russell Beale, the great British actor, to perform in those plays is to experience “redemption and transcendence.” Shakespeare’s understanding of the human condition miraculously transcends his culture, time, and place…     Continue reading →

The Cradle of Madness

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By David Phillippi

In the same 16th century England which brought the world ambition and love (see Madness: A Modern Phenomenon), a new form of mental disease—madness—appeared. While previously known forms of mental illness were temporary, related perhaps to an infection, an accident damaging the brain, a pregnancy, a bodily illness like “pox” (syphilis), or old age, madness was chronic—usually appearing at a fairly young age (without evidence of an organic cause) and lasting till death. Another of its names, lunacy, reflected the suspicion of a physical cause—specifically implicating the waxing and waning of the moon in the periodic alterations in the character and symptoms of the sufferers. The word insanity entered English at that time too, apparently referring to the same phenomenon as madness and lunacy.

The chronic nature of madness made it a legal issue from the very beginning; the first provision in English law for mentally disturbed individuals—referred to, specifically, as “madmen and lunatics”— dates back only to 1541. Also in the middle of the 16th century, Bethlehem Hospital—more commonly known as Bedlam, the world’s first mental asylum—became a public institution, transferred to the city of London in 1547. While there was probably little to be praised in terms of humane treatment and comfortable accommodations, Bedlam continued to expand into the 17th century to meet what seemed to be a growing need to house the severely mentally ill.

Physicians of the day sought to describe and understand this new phenomenon, but their methods, sources, and interpretations were thoroughly mixed. Their reliance on classical Greek and Latin terms of mental disturbance resulted in a liberal blend of (their interpretation of) the old ideas with the new reality, and though they attempted to draw distinctions between conditions, they were far from clear. The cause was usually assumed to be organic. The common attribution of madness to an imbalance of the four humors shows the strong influence of the classical medical understanding. (The use of the term melancholy as a name for mental illness in general or a particular variety of it is a prime example). Insanity might also be explained by the stars under which one was born. Some authors distinguished between organic madness and spiritual madness caused by demonic influence. Still others focused on mental states that could in turn affect the body.

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