Tag: mental illness
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Counseling
Migel Jayasinghe England, UK This article was previously published by the author between the years of 2006 and 2018. The original publisher has since been lost and the article edited and republished by Hektoen International staff. Other appearances of this text elsewhere on the internet may be unauthorized. The British Association of Counselling defines counseling as “an intervention…
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The derailment of Franklin Pierce
Jacob Appel New York, New York, United States Few subjects have attracted as much attention from medical historians, both well-founded and speculative, as the health of United States presidents. Considerable debate exists over the extent of impairment caused by Lincoln’s bouts of melancholia,1 Grant’s alcoholism,2 Wilson’s stroke,3 and Coolidge’s depression4—to name only those chief executives from…
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Ada English: The forgotten fighter
Laura KingAtlanta, GA, United States A reformer of psychiatric care, a fighter for Irish independence, and a forgotten figure in Irish history—that was Dr. Adeline (Ada) English. As a female physician working in Ireland from the beginning to the middle of the 1900s, English faced obstacles because of both her sex and her politics. However,…
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Intersection of mental illness, the supernatural, and gender in Pakistan
Sualeha Siddiq ShekhaniKarachi, Pakistan Maria sits across from me in a pristine clinic room in a private hospital in Pakistan. At first reluctant to speak about her husband’s illness, her words suddenly flow as if a dam has burst. She wants me to know everything: her suffering and her worry at taking care of her…
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Prisoners on leave: Vietnam veterans and the Golden Age Western
Edward Harvey Missoula, Montana, United States “I think we all died a little in that damn war.”—The Outlaw Josey Wales “So…what have you been up to?” When screening combat Vietnam veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder, I will often ask them about their hobbies or interests, since PTSD often manifests as an inability to find pleasure in…
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Robert Schumann’s hand injury
James L. Franklin Chicago, Illinois, United States The death of the American pianist Leon Fleisher (1928–2020)1 whose brilliant career as a piano soloist was upended in his mid-thirties by the development of a crippling movement disorder affecting his right hand, brings to mind the composer Robert Schumann whose youthful ambition to become a piano virtuoso was…
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The beginnings of humane psychiatry: Pinel and the Tukes
JMS PearceHull, England “It is perhaps not going too far to maintain that Pinel has been to eighteenth-century psychiatry what Newton was to its natural philosophy and Linnaeus to its taxonomy.”—George Rousseau, Historian, 1991 Although modern treatment of mental illness has its limitations, older methods of treatment were both crude and cruel. For centuries they…
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The legacy and maladies of Jonathan Swift
JMS PearceEngland, UK Jonathan Swift (Fig 1.) is best known for his popular Lemuel Gulliver’s: Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World published in 1726. (Fig 2.) Exciting adventures combine with satirical metaphors that parodied contemporary customs and politics. Lemuel Gulliver, the narrator, begins as a modern man but ends ironically as a mad…