New book explores overzealous diagnoses of women as mentally ill

Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors by Lisa Appignanesi investigates how some non-conformist women may have been labelled mentally ill just because they marched to a different drummer.

The New York Times review on April 26 says the book shows that "as soon as society relinquished witchcraft as the crime for which to punish an overtly liberated woman, it settled on madness as the reason to incarcerate her."

Appignanesi explains, “Patients could well find themselves the victims of a doctor’s prejudice about what kind of behavior constituted sanity: this could all too easily work against women who didn’t conform to the time’s norms of sexual behavior or living habits.”

The book explores the famous mental health cases of Zelda Fitzgerald, Lucia Joyce and Virginia Woolf, as well as "diagnoses" of many less famous female patients.