Tag: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
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The literary breakdown in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch
Carol-Ann FarkasBoston, Massachusetts, United States I. Diagnostically speaking, the “nervous” or “mental” breakdown is not a thing. The term has never been formally used in psychology, which has long preferred specific, definable categorizations of symptoms and conditions: stress, fatigue, anxiety, depression, trauma.1 And yet the phenomenon persists in popular usage.1,2 Why? We like the “breakdown”…
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Nikolai Gogol’s The Diary of a Madman
James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809–1852) was a member of the first wave of great Russian authors of the nineteenth century. Born in a Ukrainian Cossack village then part of the Russian Empire, he made his way to Saint Petersburg where he found his métier in the short story; a genre…
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Mental health in Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic and the limits of medical positivism
Taylor TsoSt. Louis, Missouri, United States In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault traces the history of our present-day understanding of disease. One of the most significant and more recent problems this understanding had to confront was the pre-nineteenth century outlook that “neuroses and essential fevers were fairly generally regarded as diseases without organic…
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Alden Nowlan, the schizotypal poet
Shane NeilsonHamilton, Ontario, Canada I suspect a psychiatrist would have pronounced me a victim of dementia praecox or some such thing.1—Alden Nowlan Applying a psychiatric diagnosis to the dead is a mug’s game. Alden Albert Nowlan (1933–1983), the critically acclaimed Canadian poet, novelist, and playwright, might agree, if one considered the bitter evidence of his…