Welcome to Litsy!

�[A work of] wit, wisdom and richness. . . . A grand tour of derangement, from matricide to anorexia.� �John Leonard, Harper�s This fascinating history of mind doctors and their patients probes the ways in which madness, badness, and sadness have been understood over the last two centuries. Lisa Appignanesi charts a story from the days when the mad were considered possessed to our own century when the official psychiatric manual lists some 350 mental disorders. Women play a key role here, both as patients�among them Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Marilyn Monroe�and as therapists. Controversially, Appignanesi argues that women have significantly changed the nature of mind-doctoring, but in the process they have also inadvertently highlighted new patterns of illness.