Diagnosis, treatment, and illnesses themselves are intimately bound up with discourses of gender, race, class, and the body. They point out that the categories are unreliable in that clinicians fail to agree on which labels to apply to a client and there is a risk of using them to stigmatise people (BPS, 2011).

I would have liked to hear Appignanesi talk about what the women in her case studies actually did and said and might have felt; whether the actual or perceived dysfunctions had any basis or commonality despite the fashions in treatment; about what in life might have brought them to their symptoms or treatments. I really enjoyed the historical examples of the treatment of women with mental health problems, and the clear way Appignanesi breaks down theories and treatments. Women's madness is theorised without being actualised, and that means that it feels to me like it lacks humanity. Because Appignanesi has a complex story to tell there is no blaming at work in this wonderful book, but a shrewd and sympathetic apprehension of what is at stake in the difficult histories of both the Mind Doctors and those they seek to help.

As the book progressed, I felt concerned that the 'mental health biographies' of modern figures were almost salacious: I felt this most strongly with the passages concerning Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe. Focussing on women's mental health and treatment over the last 200 years was an interesting premise and largely successful.

After she had a miscarriage, she became plagued by memories of her childhood and voices started to speak to her, castigating her for the 'dirty' fantasies in her memory. Pierwsza część to historie szaleństw, opisy przypadków kobiet, które czasem faktycznie traciły zmysły, a czasem po prostu odstawały od innych swoim rewolucyjnym sposobem bycia. Usually nothing that required being stated in a single sentence the size of a paragraph, when it could have been more easily understood if it had been presented in a few concise sentences instead.She concludes that Freud's perceived sexism is less relevant than his legacy: he underscored the 'shallowness of sanity' which helped to destigmatise mental illness. Part of the problem is that Appignanesi is trying very hard to shoe-horn in many related but separate issues into a single linear history: the development of psychiatry; the changing constructions and representations of gender, especially femininity; and mini biographies of all kinds of people from women labelled as 'mad, bad or sad' (e.