To: Multiple recipients of list MADNESS This is my personal reading list so far. If anyone has other favorites to add, please do so. I'm always in the market for new books critical of tossing people into locked wards and forcing them to take dangerous drugs...and calling it "therapy." What a scam! 1. How Therapists Diagnose by Bruce Hamstra - inside information on use of pyschiatric labels to obtain insurance payments as opposed to medical utility or validity 2. Beware the Talking Cure: Psychotherapy May Be Hazardous to Your Health by Thomas Campbell - Title self-explanatory 3. Madness, Heresy and the Rumors of Angels: The Revolt Against the Mental Health System by Seth Farber - How eccentric people are incarcerated, labeled, isolated and drugged by the mental health system 4. The Politics of Experience by R.D. Laing - Laing believes psychiatry is a political ploy to maintain the status quo 5. The Cry for Myth by Rollo May - May is probably too mainstream for some, but he has much of interest to say about the societal need to cultivate the imagination and build communities 6. Insanity: The Idea and its Consequences by Thomas Szasz - We all know the consequences 7. Anything else by Szasz in the index of your local library or available through interlibrary loan (Including The Myth of Mental Illness, The Manufacture of Madness, Psychiatric Justice and a Lexicon of Lunacy: Metaphoric Malady, Moral Responsibility and Psychiatry). 8. The Dinosaur Man: Tales of Madness and Enchantment from the Back Ward by Susan Baur - A sensitive memoir of a psychologist's tour of duty on the back wards and her thoughts on how to reach inmates, who are usually victims of early childhood neglect or abuse, she believes. 9. In Search of Stones by Scott Peck - A travelogue with philosophy. Peck advocates for tolerance of differences and community-building. 10. Cultures of Healing: Correcting the Image of the Mental Health System by Robert Fancher - Recommended reading. Fancher analyzes the mainstream psychotherapies and concludes they don't work very well, denounces psychiatric pretensions to scientific knowledge and generally blasts the system for allowing psychiatrists too much spurious authority. He doesn't actually propose ways to change it. 11. The Voice of Experience by R.D. Laing - Laing's theme is the need for eccentricity in society and psychiatry's campaign to stamp out differences and imagination 12. Sanity, Madness and Family by R.D. Laing and A. Sterson - Odd behavior begins at home, psychiatry scapegoats the vulnerable 13. Toxic Psychiatry by Peter Breggin - Exposes psychiatric overuse and misuse of drugs 14. The Seduction of Madness by Edward Podvall - Madness can be an escape from unbearable stress. Be kind to people in stress. 15. On Being Sane in Insane Places by D. Rosenham - Title self-explanatory 16. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situations of Mental Patients and Other Inmates by Erving Goffman - A classic must-read 17. Madness, Wisdom and Folly: The Making of a Psychiatrist by R.D. Laing - Mostly madness and folly. 18. The Loony Bin Trip by Kate Millet - She quits her meds. Bad things happen. She keeps struggling and quits the meds, but is scarred by psychiatric "treatment." She is lesbian. Her family and husband can't handle it. 19. How to Become a Schizophrenic: The Case Against Biological Psychiatry by John Modrow - There is no schizophrenia. There are subjective value judgments by authrorities. 20. Peaking Out by Al Siebert - How a non-normative psychiatrists got a psychiatric label 21. Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing by Jeffrey Masson - Classic reading, and anything else by Masson. 22. On Our Own by Judi Chamberlin - Screw learned helplessness 23. The Variety of Religious Experience by William James - Psychosis as religious experience 24. Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault - Origins and politics of the mental health system 25. And They Call It Help: The Psychological Policing of America's Children by Louise Armstrong - Psychiatry is sinister 26. Dawn of a Millenium: Beyond Evolution and Culture by Erich Harth - Harth says the militaristic and aggressive aspects of man's nature will probably result in extinction of the human species 27. A Social History of Madness: The World through the Eyes of the Insane by Roy Porter - A couple of chapters in this one on how mental insitutions arose out of economic necessity of doctors who couldn't cut it in medical school. 28. The Hero with A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell - Social pressures to conform create stress for the creative 29. Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination by Sam Keen - Imagination can become hostile if trust isn't a part of one's upbringing 30. Banished Knowledge by Alice Miller - Thoughts we aren't supposed to think, especially women 31. God by Alan Watts - Treatise on weirdness of Calvinist/materialist society's religious thinking and practices; advocates mystical experience 32. Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness by David Weeks and Jamie James - Illuminates socioeconomic lines of demarcation between eccentricity and insanity 33. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden - Psychiatrist gives credence to the imaginative capacities of a troubled teenager labeled schizophrenic 34. Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire by Hans Eysenck - Critique of Freudian theory as theory (or bunk) 35. Why Freud Was Wrong - Sorry, folks, can't remember author's name, but the premise is that Freud based all his theories on the notion that everyone in the world should be like Freud and anyone who isn't (women, for instance) is crazy. Anything by the following authors/poets who were all extremely eccentric or got themselves psychiatric labels for being different: 36. Emily Dickinson - New England recluse ponders social stasis 37. Robert Lowell - New England socialite depressed about man's inhumanity to man; conscientious objector in WWII; nonconformity won him a psychiatric label 38. Sylvia Plath - Married a boor, pressured as a child to excel at everything without complaining, victim of shock treatments, committed suicide. 39. Louise Bogan - Did a hitch or two on mental wards. One of the finest feminist poets ever. Strong sense of female emotional strength. 40. William Blake - Frequently had conversations with God. 41. Anne Sexton - Feminist poet, committed suicide. Powerful poems about women's subordination and sexual roles 42. William Cowper - Nature poet, true, classic harmless eccentric 43. Samuel Coleridge - Tooks lots of laudanum (opium derivative) for chronic rheumatism. Wrote "Kubla Khan," visonary paradiasical poem. 44. Ralph Waldo Emerson - 19th centuty Transcendentalist poet. Not psychiatrically labeled, but would be in this century. His favorite pastime was swimming nude in Walden Pond, even in his seventies. Churchman who believed church ritual was baloney. Rejected divinity of Jesus. Great American thinker. Most famous quote: "A narrow consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Escaped attentions of mental health system because it was in its infancy and he had a wide international circle of cultured friends and a stable home life. 45. Hart Crane - In vanguard of modernist poets. Homosexual. Committed suicide. Lived recklessly, loved indiscriminately, drank incessantly. Would have been in trouble with mental health system but had many protective friends who gave him shelter and company. 46. David Henry Thoreau - American naturalist and essayist. Friendship with Emerson kept him out of loony bins. Went to jail once because he opposed paying taxes. Mild-mannered anarchist. Today his motto would be, "There's no government like no government." 47. Jack Kerouac - Beat Generation writer. One of the Merry Pranksters along with Ken Kesey. The Pranksters reburbished a used bus, painted it DayGlo, christened it "Further" and set off to find America on the road. Kerouac wrote "On the Road." Kerouac was unabashedly manic. Best quote: "Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny new car in the night?" 48. Ken Kesey - Also unabashedly manic. Wrote "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," true fictional horror story about psychiatric assault on individuality via lobotomy. 49. Virginia Woolf - Feminist writer. Got psychiatric label for being depressed about oppression of women by patriarchal society. 50. Flannery O'Connor - Southern Gothic tales of too much inbreeding and religious fanaticism in the Bible Belt. Independently wealthy, she never ran afoul of psychiatry for that reason. Shared her home with peacocks. They had free run of the place. Apparently her neighbors were tolerant or didn't visit much. Had she not been wealthy, she'd have certainly been a loony bin candidate. 51. Oscar Wilde - Brilliant British homosexual playwright/poet. Did jail time for his sexual orientation. Best quote: "History is only gossip." Miscellaneous: 52. Masai Dreaming by Justin Cartwright - Mystical story set in Africa and WWII Paris, insights into African culture juxtaposed with Western man's moral imperatives 53. The Shaman's Body by Arthur Mindrell - Referents for psychosis or "dreaming states" in non-Western cultures 54. Feminist Interpretations of the Bible (edited by Lettie Russell) - Collection of essays providing interpretive approaches for women disgusted with patriarchal appropriation of Judeo-Christian tradition. How to read between the lines written by men... 55. Beyond God the Father by Mary Daly - Only for the tough-minded among us. Daly attacks patriarchy with fierce antagonism.