In Imagining Robert, Jay Neugeboren told the sad, deeply personal, often harrowing story of one man and one family's struggle with chronic mental illness. Now, he presents an overview of the entire field: a clear-eyed, articulate, comprehensive survey of our mental health care system's shortcomings and of new, effective, proven approaches that make real differences in the lives of millions of Americans afflicted with severe mental illness. A book for general readers and professionals alike, Transforming Madness is at once a critique, a message of hope and recovery, and a call to action. Filled with dramatic stories, it shows us the many ways in which people who have suffered the long-term ravages of psychiatric disorders have reclaimed full and viable lives.

Novelist Neugeboren, drawn to the field by mental illness in his family, presents a clear-eyed, articulate, survey of our mental health care system's shortcomings and of new, effective, proven approaches that make real differences in the lives of millions of Americans afflicted with severe mental illness. A book for general readers and professionals alike, this is at once a critique, a message of hope and recovery, and a call to action. Filled with dramatic stories, it shows us the many ways in which people who have suffered the long-term ravages of psychiatric disorders have reclaimed full and viable lives.--From publisher description.

"Madness" is, of course, personally experienced, but because of its intimate relationship to the sociocultural context, it is also socially constructed, culturally represented and socially controlled--all of which make it a topic rife for sociological analysis. Using a range of historical and contemporary textual material, this work exercises the sociological imagination to explore some of the most perplexing questions in the history of madness, including why some behaviors, thoughts and emotions are labeled mad while others are not; why they are labeled mad in one historical period and not another; why the label of mad is applied to some types of people and not others; by whom the label is applied, and with what consequences.

John T. Hamilton investigates how literary, philosophical, and psychological treatments of music and madness challenge the limits of representation, thereby creating a crisis of language. He particularly focuses on the decidedly autobiographical impulse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where musical experience and mental disturbance disrupt the expression of referential thought, illuminating the irreducible aspects of the self before language can work them back into a discursive system. The study begins in the 1750s with Diderot's "Neveu de Rameau," and situates that text in relation to Rousseau's reflections on the voice and the burgeoning discipline of musical aesthetics. Hamilton then traces the linkage of music and madness that courses through the work of Herder, Hegel, Wackenroder, and Kleist before turning his attention to E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose writings of the first decades of the nineteenth century accumulate and qualify preceding traditions. Throughout his analysis, Hamilton considers the particular representations that link music and madness, exploring underlying motives, preconceptions, and ideological premises that facilitate the association of these two experiences.

Wieland; or The Transformation (1798) ties revolutionary-era Gothic themes to struggles over the politics of Enlightenment on both sides of the Atlantic. This edition of Wieland includes Brown's Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist and writings on Cicero, as well as his key essays on history and literature, and selections from contemporary German and other texts that figure in the novel's background and in the charged atmosphere of the late 1790s.

In Sanity, Madness, Transformation, Ross Woodman offers an extended reflection on the relationship between sanity and madness in Romantic literature. Woodman is one of the field's most distinguished authorities on psychoanalysis and romanticism. Engaging with the works of Northrop Frye, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung, he argues that madness is essential to the writings of William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley, and that it has been likewise fundamental to the emergence of the modern subject in psychoanalysis and literary theory. For Frye, madness threatens humanism, whereas for Derrida its relationship is more complex, and more productive. Both approaches are informed by Freudian and Jungian responses to the psyche, which, in turn, are drawn from an earlier Romantic ambivalence about madness. This work, which began as a collection of Woodman's essays assembled by colleague Joel Faflak, quickly evolved into a new book that approached Romanticism from an original psychoanalytic perspective by returning madness to its proper place in the creative psyche. Sanity, Madness, Transformation is a provocative hybrid of theory, literary criticism, and autobiography and is yet another decisive step in a distinguished academic career.

At the turn of the millennium, narrative works by Latin American women writers have represented madness within contexts of sociopolitical strife and gender inequality. This book explores contemporary Latin American realities through madness narratives by prominent women authors, including Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay), Lya Luft (Brazil), Diamela Eltit (Chile), Cristina Rivera Garza (Mexico), Laura Restrepo (Colombia) and Irene Vilar (Puerto Rico). Close reading of these works reveals a pattern of literary techniques--a "poetics of madness"--employed by the writers to represent conditions that defy language, make sociopolitical crises tangible and register cultural perceptions of mental illness through literature.