BACKGROUND In order to facilitate case identification of incident (untreated and recent onset) cases of psychosis and controls in three sites in India, Nigeria and Trinidad, we sought to understand how psychoses (or madness) were conceptualized locally. The evidence we gathered also contributes to a long history of research on concepts of madness in diverse settings. METHODS We conducted focu...

The vacuum in the context of social representations: an explanatory hypothesis for the social representation of madness. The present article suggests that cultural contents can be studied with the help of social representations theory. The results of some studies that have described the social representation of madness are described, emphasizing a recurrent characteristic: otherness, that is, m...

This paper approximates interrelations between representations of madness, and virtuality in Immersive Virtual Environments semiotically. Thereby, social and sensual performances indicating coded acts of practice are mapped, and investigated from several perspectives. The authors give an introduction to these ‘altered states’, and suggest that it is possible to learn from codes and mappings of ...

This article is the result of research associated with the representation of madness and the insane in contemporary Brazilian songs. Michel Foucault's considerations about the history of madness and those of Mary Jane Spink about discursive practices and the production of meaning formed the theoretical base for the study. The methodology consisted in mapping the circulation of words and meaning...

fool" or the wily "artificial fool" like Friedrich Taubmann who served as "merry counselor' to the electors of Saxony. Midelfort's discussion of court buffoons, like his closing chapters on pilgrims and hospital inmates, exploits little-known, or insufficiently utilized, archival and printed literature in ways that help overturn facile generalizations. 'Pilgrims in Search of Reason' mines mirac...

6 INTRODUCTION 7 o Towards a historiography of colonial psychiatry in the Caribbean 8 o Literature and madness 14 o Outline of the thesis 17 Chapter 1: Historical background 23 o A brief history of the lunatic asylum in Trinidad and British Guiana 23  Trinidad 24  British Guiana 29 o Robert Grieve: The Asylum Journal 1881 (-1886) 31  Humanitarian treatment of the insane 33  Insane bodies .....

here are clouds in the painting, of course. Almost any one of us would have included those clouds, thick with electricity and rainwater. And there is the wheat field, smudged out like an empty palm, orange beneath the storm-stricken sun. Surely, many of us would have insisted on the wheat as well. Through the middle of the wheat, a rutted road slices to the horizon and disappears beneath the cl...

Psychotic and religious experiences have been associated since the earliest recorded history, and undoubtedly before. The Old Testament uses the same term, in reference to madness sent by God as a punishment for the disobedient, and to describe the behavior of prophets (Rosen, 1968). Socrates declared, "Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, provided the madness is given us by div...

We present a critical review of La philosophie de la folie, second edition, published in 1804. Joseph Daquin's thoughts and clinical activity in the psychiatric field are described. Daquin's ideas about various forms of madness and the different therapeutic, moral, physical treatments, his anatomical studies, successes and failures are presented. Several clinical cases are described. The author...