Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors

In Mad, Bad and Sad, cultural historian and novelist Lisa Appignanesi takes us on a journey through extreme states of mind and explores how a rising profession of mind doctors has diagnosed them over the last two hundred years. Using the cases of celebrated, infamous, and ordinary women, she charts the ways in which more and more of our inner life and emotions have become a matter for medics and therapists. With psychoanalyst Susie Orbach, she discusses how craziness takes on the expressive cloak of its epoch and interrogates a range of contemporary diagnoses such as anorexia and depression.

Lisa Appignanesi was born in Poland and brought up in France and Canada. She was a university lecturer in European Studies before becoming Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. She has produced several television films and is the author of five novels, including The Memory Man and several books of non-fiction, including a study of Simone de Beauvoir, Freud's Women and a  family memoir, Losing the Dead. She is president of English PEN and chair of its Free Expression is No Offence campaign.

Susie Orbach is a psychotherapist and writer. With Luise Eichenbaum she co-founded The Women's Therapy Centre in London. She lectures extensively in Europe and North America, is a visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, and has a practice seeing individuals and couples and consulting to organizations. She is a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines, as well as to radio and television programmes. She is the author, among others, of On Eating,  Fat is a Feminist Issue and The Impossibility of Sex.

In association with English Pen, www.englishpen.org