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Literature and Madness: Fiction for Students and Professionals

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Abstract

Psychiatry studies the human mind within a medical paradigm, exploring experience, response and reaction, emotion and affect. Similarly, writers of fiction explore within a non-clinical dimension the phenomena of the human mind. The synergism between literature and psychiatry seems clear, yet literature—and in particular, fiction—remain the poor relation of the medical textbook. How can literature be of particular relevance in psychiatry? This paper examines these issues and suggests a selection of useful texts.

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Notes

  1. David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel (London: Secker & Warburg, 2002), 10-11.

  2. Femi Oyebode, “Literature and psychiatry,” Psychiatric Bulletin 26 (2002): 121.

  3. See General Medical Council, Tomorrow’s Doctors, (February, 2003). Available online. Accessed 22/10/07. http://www.gmc-uk.org/education/undergraduate/undergraduate_policy/tomorrows_doctors.asp

  4. See T. J. Collett and J. C. McLachlan, “Evaluating a poetry workshop in medical education,” Medical Humanities 32 (2006): 59–64.

  5. See A. Rudnick, “An introductory course in philosophy of medicine,” Medical Humanities 20 (2004): 54–56.

  6. See F. C. Biley and J. Champney-Smith, “ ‘Attempting to say something without saying it…’: writing haiku in health care education,” Medical Humanities 29 (2003): 39–42.

  7. See M. Louis-Courvoisier and A Wenger, “How to make the most of history and literature in the teaching of medical humanities: the experience of the University of Geneva,” Medical Humanities 31 (2005): 51–54. See also L. Jacobson et al, “A Literature and medicine special study module run by academics in general practice: two evaluations and the lessons learnt.” Medical Humanities 30 (2004): 98–100.

  8. Martyn Evans, “Roles for literature in medical education,” Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 9 (2003): 384.

  9. Amanda J. Hampshire and Anthony J. Avery, “What can students learn from studying medicine in literature?” Medical Education 35 (2001): 687–690.

  10. William E. Stempsey, “The quarantine of philosophy in medical education: Why teaching the humanities may not produce humane physicians,” Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 2 (1999): 5.

  11. Richard Meakin, “Education and debate: Developing the place of medical humanities in medical education from school to the consulting room,” Medical Humanities 27 (2001): 50.

  12. Allan Beveridge, “Should psychiatrists read fiction?” British Journal of Psychiatry 182 (2003): 385.

  13. Beveridge, 386.

  14. Andrew Sims, Symptoms in the Mind (Philadelphia: Saunders / Elsevier Science Ltd, 2003), 16.

  15. Sims, 17.

  16. Sims, 17

  17. Femi Oyebode, “Fictional narrative and psychiatry,” Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 10 (2004): 142.

  18. Jenny Diski, 1990, Then Again. (London: Vintage, 1991), 202.

  19. Diski, 1990, 117.

  20. Bebe Moore Campbell, 2005, 72 Hour Hold (New York: Anchor Books, 2006), 49.

  21. Jenny Diski, 1986, Nothing Natural (London: Virago, 2003), 186.

  22. Stephen T. Moran, “Autopathography and Depression: Describing the ‘Despair Beyond Despair’,” Journal of Medical Humanities 27 (2006): 90.

  23. Jenny Diski, 1994, Monkey’s Uncle (London: Phoenix, 1994), 18–19.

  24. Diski, 1994, 168.

  25. Martin Amis, 1987, “Insight at Flame Lake,” in Einstein’s Monsters (London: Vintage 2003), 61.

  26. Amis, 1987, 61–2.

  27. Amis, 1987, 62.

  28. Patrick McGrath, “Problem of drawing from psychiatry for a fiction writer,” Psychiatric Bulletin 26 (2002): 140–141.

  29. Oyebode (2004), 142.

  30. Salley Vickers, 2006, The Other Side of You (London: Harper Perennial, 2007), 18.

  31. Vickers, 41.

  32. Mark Haddon, 2003, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime (London: Vintage, 2004), 19.

  33. Haddon, 20.

  34. Kristen Waterfield Duisberg, 2003, The Good Patient (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2003), 11.

  35. Duisberg, 275.

  36. Clare Allan, “Poppy Shakespeare could never have been written had I not spent nigh on a third of my life as a patient in the psychiatric system...,”. Available online. http://www.bloomsbury.com/Authors/microsite.asp?id=1059&section=1&aid=1487 (Accessed 19/10/2007).

  37. Alice Walker, 1992, Possessing the Secret of Joy (London: Vintage, 1993), 11.

  38. Walker, 1992, 17.

  39. See Moran, 79, for a description of this phrase as used in psychiatry.

  40. Femi Oyebode, “Autobiographical narrative and psychiatry,” Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 9 (2003): 269

  41. Dinesh Bhugra has written some interesting articles on this topic — see references.

  42. Andy Bickle, “Correspondence – Fictional narrative and psychiatrists,” Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 10 (2004): 479.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Leverhulme Trust for the project ‘The representation of madness in post-war British and American fiction’. Grant number: reference F/00114/AN

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Correspondence to Paul Crawford.

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Crawford, P., Baker, C. Literature and Madness: Fiction for Students and Professionals. J Med Humanit 30, 237–251 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-009-9089-1

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