Madness<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Darian Leader notes in What Is Madness? that the various theories of madness that have been developed over the past fifty years are \u201cmore or less unknown\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/09\/madness\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Madness\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Darian Leader notes in What Is Madness? that the various theories of madness that have been developed over the past fifty years are \u201cmore or less unknown\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/09\/madness\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Leithart\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:author\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/Leithart\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-09-02T00:00:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Peter Leithart\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@PLeithart\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Peter Leithart\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"2 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/09\/madness\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/09\/madness\/\",\"name\":\"Madness\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2016-09-02T00:00:00+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2016-09-02T00:00:00+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/#\/schema\/person\/6bb7113e4dd45fe26045622aa56f891d\"},\"description\":\"Darian Leader notes in What Is Madness? 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{"id":18334,"date":"2016-09-02T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-09-02T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=97"},"modified":"2016-09-02T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-09-02T00:00:00","slug":"madness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/09\/madness\/","title":{"rendered":"Madness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

D<\/span>arian Leader notes in What Is Madness?<\/a> that the various theories of madness that have been developed over the past fifty years are \u201cmore or less unknown outside a very narrow professional field\u201d (2). That research has been undertaken within a psychoanalytic framework, and is barely known even to \u201cmost psychiatrists, psychologists, and mental health workers\u201d (3).<\/p>\n

One reason for this neglect is a bias against psychoanalysis, or a bias against the caricature that passes for psychoanalysis. Leader things that psychoanalysis has much to teach us, especially in its detailed attention to individual patients: \u201cThe attention to the uniqueness of each patient that the psychoanalytic approach involves is all the more important now, as we live in a society that has less and less space for the detail and value of individual lives. Despite the ubiquitous lip service to respecting difference and diversity, people today are coerced more than ever to think in uniform ways, from the nursery to the corridors of the professorial life. We see this reflected in the mental health world, where treatment is often considered an almost mechanized technique to be applied to a passive patient, rather than as a joint collaborative work, where each part has responsibilities. There is increasing pressure today to see mental health services as a kind of garage, where people are rehabilitated and sent back to their jobs\u2014and perhaps to their families\u2014as soon as possible. The psychotic subject has become less a person to be listened to than an object to be treated. The patient\u2019s specificity and life story are often just airbrushed away. Where old psychiatry books were once filled with the reported speech of patients, today all one sees are statistics and pseudo-mathematical diagrams. Studies hardly ever mention what happens in unique cases, but present figures where the cases have been aggregated together. . . . The individual has vanished\u201d (3-4).<\/p>\n

He cites an example of a patient who went to the hospital during a \u201cmanic episode\u201d: \u201cWhen I arrived at the ward, a large security guard was sitting on top of her, while a nurse attempted to administer an injection. Since being forcibly restrained was one of the most devastating aspects of her childhood history, this situation was not a happy one for her and she resisted most vigorously,. This led to even greater physical pressure.\u201d In the aftermath, the hospital \u201cgave her little room to speak about what had happened. There was no interested in the detail of what precipitated her episode. Instead, she described how she was forced into a set of concepts and categories that were alien to her.\u201d She was instructed about her behavior, told to think differently and to learn to conform to standards of normality, and she was assigned a diagnostic label. What Leader sees missing is \u201cthe inner life and beliefs of each person\u201d (6-7).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"