Who is ‘mad’? Who is not? And who decides?
In this fascinating new exploration of mental illness, Professor Brendan Kelly examines ‘madness’ in history and how we have responded to it over the centuries.
We travel from the psychiatric institutions of India to Victorian scientific studies of the brain. We discover the beginnings of formal asylum care and witness the experimental ‘therapies’ of the cavernous psychiatric hospitals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Ireland, England, Belgium, Italy, Germany and the US.