Although mental illness often brings feelings of gloom and despair, sometimes a person classified as mentally ill feels supremely happy-the bliss of madness.

In the Quechua-speaking peasant communities of southern Peru, mental disorder is understood less as individualized pathology and more as a disturbance in family and social relationships. For many Andeans, food and feeding are ontologically fundamental to such relationships. This paper uses data from interviews and participant observation in a rural province of Cuzco to explore the significance ...

INTRODUCTION Hypothyroidism is one of the most important causes of treatable dementia, and psychosis occasionally associated with it is known as myxedema madness. We report a case of a 90-year-old patient who developed myxedema madness acutely without overt clinical symptoms and signs suggestive of hypothyroidism. CASE PRESENTATION A 90-year-old Japanese man, a general practitioner, was admit...


 In this article, I argue that case files kept by doctors, nurses, and attendants in Canadian Asylums, act as sites of performative madness enforced the observer. applying Foucauldian performance theories, look at production knowledge, influence power, which allow for encoding a ritualized behaviour is repeatable outside individual being recorded mad. To illustrate point, use several from...

main theme a fascinating topic. In Renaissance Europe the insane were frequently at large. The Age of Enlightenment, coinciding with the increased growth of cities, seems to have led to their confinement?and to intensified ill-treatment. The account of these developments enables Dr. Foucault to imply that the role of the doctor as a magician and as the protagonist of society's attitudes to the ...

"semi-welfare state" (p. 29 )-reflects his historicist bias that events should unfold toward goals set by historians. To Katz, Western Europe provides models of "complete welfare states". Like most ambitious books, this one has flaws. The first four chapters are mainly about a few communities in Eastern states, rather than about America. Because he excludes health services (except public mental...

It may not be a household word, but by now the Kyoto Protocol has become a well-known political slogan. President Bush has called it fundamentally flawed, while some environmentalists in America and Europe have said it is essential for saving the Earth’s climate and the future of humanity itself. Many on the right have called it economic madness, while for many on the left it is an ecological a...

In several countries poker games are, probably, the most famous card games. Although each variant of poker has its own rules, all of them are characterized by the utilization of money to make sense the challenge. Nowadays, in the collective consciousness, some variants of poker are referred as skill games and others as gamble games. The utilization of money plays a fundamental role as it affect...

I offer a major reassessment of Foucault’s philosophico-historical account of the basic problems of modernity. I revise our understanding of Foucault by countering the influential misinterpretations proffered by his European interlocutors such as Habermas and Derrida. Central to Foucault’s account of modernity was his work on two crucial concept pairs: freedom/power and reason/madness. I argue ...

Anna did not simply decide one day that people were made of paper. She came to the conclusion slowly and reluctantly, several months after she ! rst noticed that the consistency of everything around her had subtly changed. Books and chairs and buildings were no longer solid but composed of tiny, buzzing particles. She thought if she blew on a lamppost it should disperse into air. On her way to ...