Tag: Psychiatry and Psychology
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Hamlet and everyone after
Panayiota AntypasTasmania, Australia For most of my life, I believed that suicidality was a direct consequence of acute and unmedicated mental illness. I thought that if we admitted the patient, removed the means, and administered treatment, they would be quickly reinvigorated with a will to live. Then I met patients, colleagues, and friends who wanted…
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The lost genius of Vaslav Nijinsky
Stephen McWilliamsDublin, Ireland Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film Black Swan tells the tale of a dancer in the New York City Ballet’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Key to the story is the ballerina’s descent into psychosis under immense pressure to compete for the leading part of the White Swan. The film, inspired in part by…
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Grunya Sukhareva and the early observation of autistic behavior
Martine MussiesUtrecht, The Netherlands Grunya Efimovna Sukhareva was born and trained in Kyiv, Ukraine. By the early 1920s she had moved to Moscow, where she worked in a school for children with neurological difficulties and began keeping meticulous records of her young patients. She noted their difficulties alongside their gifts: a boy who had taught…
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Identity beyond memory: Rethinking early onset Alzheimer’s disease
Firas Ghanem Beirut, LebanonNancy ChedidCambridge, Massachusetts, United States “On my good days, I can almost pass for a normal person, and on my bad days, I feel like I can’t find myself. I’ve always been so defined by my intellect, my language, my articulation, and now sometimes I can see the words hanging in front of…
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A medical and cultural history of nostalgia
Martine MussiesUtrecht, The Netherlands “The past is not dead. It is not even past.” —William Faulkner Today, nostalgia is described as a warm, bittersweet emotion—a longing for a bygone era, a childhood melody, or a photograph in sepia tones. But for more than a century, nostalgia was classified as a disease. Coined by Swiss physician Johannes…
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Mental illness, conscience, and time in the fiction of Peter Swanson
Stephen McWilliams Dublin, Ireland In Peter Swanson’s fifth novel, Before She Knew Him, Hen and Lloyd move in next door to Mira and Matthew in West Dartford, Massachusetts. Hen soon suspects her new neighbor of murder, but has trouble convincing people because her own history of mental illness makes her an unreliable witness in the eyes…
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Pine Rest and the Dutch Reformed vision: A historical perspective on mental health care in West Michigan
Nicole BuozisGrand Rapids, Michigan, United States Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services is a nonprofit organization providing comprehensive mental healthcare services in Michigan. With a 220-acre campus in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and nineteen outpatient locations across the state, Pine Rest is the largest freestanding behavioral health provider in Michigan and the third largest in the…
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Psychiatry and homosexuality in E.M. Forster’s Maurice
Jennifer ParkerBristol, England Introduction “The man in my book is, roughly speaking, good, but Society nearly destroys him,” E.M. Forster wrote in 1915 when describing the eponymous character in his novel Maurice.1,2 Anti-homosexual sentiment saturated British society in the twentieth century, overseen by intertwined medical and legal institutions that both constructed and constricted homosexuality on…
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Eric Ambler’s psychopath
Stephen McWilliamsDublin, Ireland Years before Ian Fleming, John le Carré, and Alistair MacLean were popular, there was another spy novelist they all admired. His name was Eric Ambler and, in the late 1930s, just as Europe’s core temperature was heating up for war, Hodder and Stoughton published half a dozen of his earliest thrillers. His…
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Book review: Frames of Minds: A History of Neuropsychiatry on Screen
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England In this fascinating book, author Eelco Wijdicks traces the history of psychiatry and neuropsychiatry in cinema. From the beginnings of commercial film in Paris in 1895, directors and screenwriters have told medical stories, both as entertainment and as a medium for understanding various aspects of the human condition. Frames of Minds…