Hysteria, mania and the commercial–political nature of psychiatric disease

Extract

Can diseases have biographies? What makes biography (the history of the lives of individual men; Oxford English Dictionary) engrossing are the lessons learnt from how individuals chance under the influence of society and culture, and vice versa. Most diseases are unvarying pathophysiological entities not evolving personalities, and therefore one might conclude have little potential for biography, but the two books under review prove the contrary. This is perhaps because psychiatric disease has had, for most of history, no known pathophysiology and is susceptible to sociocultural explanation. Indeed, antipsychiatrists maintain that a disease without pathophysiology is not a disease at all; and that ‘psychiatric disease’ is nothing more than a social contrivance or political façade. Even if one rejects this extreme position, it is very clear that the conceptualization of disease in the field of psychiatry is far from objective and very prone to political, commercial and temporal influences. Both these two books illustrate how fruitful a biographical approach can be in the context of psychiatric disease; each showing how this category of disease is moulded by public opinion, commerce and politics. These biographies reveal as much about the post-lapsarian human condition as about disease and, as such, are both well worth reading.