"Mental illness has long been one of the most baffling phenomena known to us. It is devastating for the individual suffering from it and incomprehensible for those around him or her. This exquisite volume brings together a number of essential texts in the history of psychiatry, highlighting the changing ideas of physicians and the experience of madness. It is an invaluable aid to students in the history of psychiatry, psychology, medicine, and the humanities." -Hans Pols, Unit for the History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney "There is no comparable sourcebook dealing with mental illness in Western society and this collection of texts fills an existing void." -Gerald Grob, Henry E. Sigerist Professor of the History of Medicine Emeritus, Rutgers University "A rich and thought-provoking collection of historical sources that reminds us of the limitations of our own passing perspectives on madness and mental health." -Eric J. Engstrom, Department of History, Humboldt University, Berlin From Madness to Mental Health neither glorifies nor denigrates the contributions of psychiatry, clinical psychology, and psychotherapy, but rather considers how mental disorders have historically challenged the ways in which human beings have understood and valued their bodies, minds, and souls. Greg Eghigian has compiled a unique anthology of readings, from ancient times to the present, that includes Hippocrates; Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love, penned in the 1390s; Dorothea Dix; Aaron T. Beck; Carl Rogers; and others, culled from religious texts, clinical case studies, memoirs, academic lectures, hospital and government records, legal and medical treatises, and art collections. Incorporating historical experiences of medical practitioners and those deemed mentally ill, From Madness to Mental Health also includes an updated bibliography of first-person narratives on mental illness compiled by Gail A. Hornstein. Greg Eghigian is the director of the science, technology, and society program and associate professor of modern history at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including The Self as Project: Politics and the Human Sciences in the Twentieth Century.

In a Victorian-era German asylum, seamstress Agnes Richter painstakingly stitched a mysterious autobiographical text into every inch of the jacket she created from her institutional uniform. Despite every attempt to silence them, hundreds of other psychiatric patients have managed to get their stories out, or to publish them on their own. Today, in a vibrant network of peer-advocacy groups all over the world, those with firsthand experience of emotional distress are working together to unravel the mysteries of madness and to help one another recover. Agnes's Jacket tells their story, focusing especially on the Hearing Voices Network (HVN), an international collaboration of professionals, people with lived experience, and their families and friends who have been working to develop an alternative approach to coping with voices, visions, and other extreme states that is empowering and useful and does not start from the assumption that such people have a chronic illness. A vast gulf exists between the way medicine explains psychiatric conditions and the experiences of those who suffer. Hornstein's work helps us to bridge that gulf, guiding us through the inner lives of those diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar illness, depression, and paranoia, and emerging with nothing less than a new model for understanding one another and ourselves.