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SAGE Journal User Guide

Article 1: Zaviršek, D. (2000). A historical overview of women’s hysteria in Slovenia. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 7, (2). 169-188.

[This article explores how hysteria was portrayed in medical literature in Slovenia and how the conceptualization of hysteria influenced women’s lives at the end of the 19^th and the beginning of the 20^th centuries.]

Questions to Consider: 

1. According to the article, what role did the conceptualization of hysteria play in promoting gender inequality?
2. Identify and discuss the main social and economic factors that influenced the growth of large mental asylums during the late 19^th and early 20^th century in Europe.
3. Identify and discuss various ways by which women’s femininity was controlled as a means to control women’s public and private lives. Who benefited from such control?
4. What is the “health police” and its role as described in the article? Discuss the relationship between the “health police” and morality.

Article 2: Gilman, S. L. (2014). Madness as disability. History of Psychiatry, 25, (4). 441-449.

[This article examines the ever changing conceptualizations of mental illness and its relationship to disability and creativity. It focuses on images of mental illness as madness in the 19^th century and on autism as a disability in modern times.]

Questions to Consider:

1. Discuss the relationship between mental illness and madness. Why it is important to study different traditions and conceptualizations of mental illness?
2. Identify various historical conceptualizations of madness as described in the article.  Discuss some major differences of how madness was understood in different historical periods.
3. Compare positivist views on mental illness that are prevalent in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases, Injuries and Causes of Death (ICD), as well as in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association and the alternative views on mental illness proposed by E. Goffman, R.D. Laing, and T. Szasz.
4. Discuss the relationship between mental illness and disability in the context of the DSM-5 revisions of the criteria for autism spectrum disorders.