She was a founding member and editorial director of the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative. During 1970-71 she was a staff writer for the Centre for Community Research in New York City and is a former University of Essex lecturer in European Studies. She graduated from McGill University with a B.A. She grew up in the province of Quebec - first in a small Laurentian town, subsequently in Montreal. Following her birth, her parents moved to Paris, France, and in 1951 they emigrating to Canada. Mad, Bad, and Sad takes us on a fascinating journey through the fragile, extraordinary human mind.Įlżbieta Borensztejn was born on 4 January 1946 in Łódź, Poland, the daughter of Hena and Aaron Borensztejn with Jewish origin.

Here too is the story of how over the years symptoms and diagnoses have developed together to create fashions in illness and how treatments have succeeded or sometimes failed. From Mary Lamb, sister of Charles, who in the throes of a nervous breakdown turned on her mother with a kitchen knife, to Freud, Jung, and Lacan, who developed the new women-centered therapies, Lisa Appignanesi’s research traces how more and more of the inner lives and emotions of women have become a matter for medics and therapists. This is the story of how we have understood extreme states of mind over the last two hundred years and how we conceive of them today, from the depression suffered by Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath to the mental anguish and addictions of iconic beauties Zelda Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe.

A brave and brilliantly researched intellectual history of the relationship between women and mental illness since 1800.

Mad, Bad, and Sad by Lisa Appignanesi