Madness Explained
Richard P. Bentall
Language: English
Pages: 656
ISBN: 0140275401
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
THIS BOOK WILL EXPLAIN WHAT MADNESS IS, TO SHOW THAT IT CAN BE UNDERSTOOD IN PSYCHOLOGICAL TERMS, AND THAT BY STUDYING IT WE CAN LEARN IMPORTANT INSIGHTS ABOUT THE NORMAL MIND. THE BOOK WILL ARGUE THAT TRADITIONAL APPROACHES TO MADNESS MUST BE ABANDONED IN FAVOUR OF A NEW APPROACH WHICH IS MORE CONSISTENT WITH THAT WE NOW KNOW ABOUT THE HUMAN MIND. OVER THE LAST CENTURY OR SO IT HAS BECOME SO COMMONPLACE TO REGARD MADNESS SIMPLY AS A MEDICAL CONDITION THAT IT HAS BECOME DIFFICULT TO THINK OF IT IN ANY OTHER WAY. BENTALL ARGUES INSTEAD THAT DELUSIONS, HALLUCINATIONS AND OTHER UNUSUAL BEHAVIOURS ARE BEST UNDERSTOOD PSYCHOLOGICALLY, AND THAT SUCH EXPERIENCES FOR THE MOST PART REPRESENT EXAGGERATIONS OF MENTAL FOIBLES TO WHICH WE ARE ALL PRONE.
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and unable to find a motel room, he drove through the night without stopping. By the time of his arrival, Mr. B, who had been euthymic [that is, in a normal mood], became hypomanic. The first year the mania escalated and required hospitalisation; the following year it was possible to attenuate the severity of his mania through early treatment with adjunctive neuroleptic medications.42 Nocturnal physiological measurements have confirmed that loss of sleep is a characteristic of mania.43 Several
Journal of Medical Psychology, 67: 53–66. 74. J. M. G. Williams, A. Mathews and C. MacLeod (1996) ‘The emotional Stroop task and psychopathology’, Psychological Bulletin, 120: 3–24. 75. K. M. Leafhead, A. W. Young and T. K. Szulecka (1996) ‘Delusions demand attention’, Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 1: 5–16. 76. S. Kaney, M. Wolfenden, M. E. Dewey and R. P. Bentall (1992) ‘Persecutory delusions and the recall of threatening and non-threatening propositions’, British Journal of Clinical Psychology,
Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (1995) Princeton: Princeton University Press. * It is easy to confuse the idea of a dimension of experience with the idea of a dimension ofpersonality, but they are not the same. The first suggests that different kinds of experience (for example, vivid daydreams and hearing voices) may be related to each other, whereas the second indicates that people differ in their propensity to have those experiences. Of course, both types of dimension
other. If we then place patients along this dimension of schizophrenic versus manic-depressive, we should be able to observe whether they fall into two separate groups with clearly different scores, or whether many patients have intermediate scores indicating a mixture of the two types of symptoms. I have just described, in a very simple way, the rationale for a statistical technique known as discriminant function analysis. The actual methods used to calculate the scores of individual patients
of classifying patients. The problem here seems to be a persisting naivety about the relationship between the biological and the psychological, which has deep roots within our culture. Its origins predate Descartes, who, three and a half centuries ago, articulated the philosophical doctrine of dualism, which holds that the mind and brain are different kinds of substances, the former non-material and the latter physical. This idea is so entrenched in our language and our folk psychology that,
