The Eysenck Personality Profiler (EPP: Eysenck et al, 1999) is a contender to replace the DSM but there are others, such as the Big-5, as well as tailored instruments like those of Millon (2008). Prolonged impoverishment of potential, she notes, is a near certain predictor of a brush either with the mental health authorities or the prison system. All in all, this was a decent book, at times the book seemed really long (560 pages) and dry and before i knew it, i read about 10 pages and was thinking about something totally off topic. This is the story of how we have understood extreme states of mind over the last two hundred years and how we conceive of them today, when more and more of our inner life and emotions have become a matter for medics and therapists.

Treatments are available for psychopathy but, in any case, it should not matter too much because the real issue is one ofdangerousness. The full title of this book is Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present. Appignanesi discusses the growth of modern pathologies such as anorexia and bulimia; and appears somewhat awkward when writing on the exposure of historical rape, sex abuse and related traumatic memories from the mid-1980s.

Alice Anderson, Louise Bourgeois, Helen Chadwick, Tracey Emin, Elliott Erwitt, Jane Fradgley, Anna Furse, Isa Genzken, Susan Hiller, Joanna Kane, Sarah Lucas, Lydia Lys, Amie Siegel and Francis Upritchard, plus Richard Dadd and Salvador Dali. It could perhaps have been reduced by about 25% in length without any loss of interest - indeed it would have benefited from a litlle pruning. Or are there life events unique to the female experience that make women more susceptible to mental health problems? It is too late to abandon terms like depression, anxiety, distortion of reality, antisocial or histrionic behaviour. Usually nothing that required being stated in a single sentence the size of a paragraph, when it could have been more easily understood if it had been presented in a few concise sentences instead.

Of course, self-report questionnaires are fakeable so in some circumstances we need to look towards brain-based assessments that cannot be manipulated. et al (2009) The response of mental health professionals to clients seeking help to change or redirect same-sex sexual orientation. Following the medical model, clinicians have to say whether an individual should have the label attached to them as a “yes-no” decision based on certain specified criteria. There have always been more female mental patients than male, and they have been treated differently most of the time.

The book is 547 pages long and probably could have been longer – though I felt that it should have been shorter, as the book became more and more list-like as it went on, and the pattern of case and contextual history, then another case, got a little repetitive. As the book progressed, I felt concerned that the 'mental health biographies' of modern figures were almost salacious: I felt this most strongly with the passages concerning Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe. I really felt it was a trudge to get through it and for little enjoyment in comparison to the time it took me to read it.

Women play a key role here, both as patients - among them Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Marilyn Monroe - and as therapists. Informative in startling ways, and never dull in the academic way, Appignanesi's genuinely new History of the Mind Doctors is a subtle and accessible account of that perhaps most daunting of modern relationships, the one between the Mind Doctor and his female patient. V. (2007) Transforming normality into pathology: The DSM and the outcomes of stressful social arrangements. This paper will reveal how cultural beliefs and superstitions associated with the female body, as communicated by the medical profession, had a profound impact on the image of the mad or violent women in nineteenth-century texts. Her focus on sweeping historical paradigms and shifts also make this an ideal introduction to discourses of madness in the West.We may have moved beyond 19th-century practice of observing and cataloguing 'female hysteria', but we have not lessened the incidence of mental illness in women. From Freud and Jung and the radical breakthroughs of psychoanalysis to Lacan's construction of a modern movement and the new women-centred therapies.

He has appeared on numerous television and radio programmes and has published more than 150 scientific.Unwieldy intellectually, this work is nevertheless full of fresh insights and contentious suppositions, and is bound to provoke the reader in interesting ways.