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about lunacy. 2 Thus The Times article both critiqued sensation journalism and reflected general feelings about Victorian lunatics. For those with little first-hand experience of mental disease, media stories would have been the most likely, and the most frequent, encounter with the issues of insanity. These stories helped shape cultural tropes of madness. While the most common types of article written on madness were narrative updates on local asylums, these would only attract the interest of
of the hygienist movement or the rise of mass media, their findings do not always fully apply to the Belgian sociopolitical context. From existing case studies we know that local specificities are crucial to understand the transformation of medical knowledge. For example, Peeters has suggested that humoral representations of the body adhered to the worldview of many Catholic
earliest known ‘Indian’ civilisation. 1 One of the points of contention among political factions is whether the Indus Valley Civilisation is Vedic or whether the Vedas and their associated culture and language were brought into the subcontinent by migrants from outside of India (Thapar, 1996 ). The discovery of the Rakhigarhi skeletons and the subsequent analysis of the ancient DNA extracted from them resulted in a flurry of activity in Indian media. The narrative of genetics holding the key to the human past is an
stigmatisation of sex workers, but also how inclusion and collaboration can promote effective public health interventions. Prostitution becomes a social problem In a study of Norwegian media coverage of prostitution, sociologist May-Len Skilbrei showed that the press in the 1970s did not usually present prostitution as a problem. 4 Prostitution was discussed either as an exotic phenomenon or a nuisance to the
Challenging the assumption that the stigma attached to mental illness stems from public ignorance and irresponsible media coverage, this book examines mental healthcare workers’ efforts to educate the public in Britain between 1870 and 1970. It covers a period which saw the polarisation of madness and sanity give way to a belief that mental health and illness formed a continuum, and in which segregative care within the asylum began to be displaced by the policy of community care. The book argues that the representations of mental illness conveyed by psychiatrists, nurses and social workers were by-products of professional aspirations, economic motivations and perceptions of the public, sensitive to shifting social and political currents. Sharing the stigma of their patients, many healthcare workers sought to enhance the prestige of psychiatry by emphasising its ability to cure acute and minor mental disorder. However, this strategy exacerbated the stigma attached to severe and enduring mental health problems. Indeed, healthcare workers occasionally fuelled the stereotype of the violent, chronically-ill male patient in an attempt to protect their own interests. Drawing on service users’ observations, the book contends that current campaigns, which conflate diverse experiences under the label mental illness, risk trivialising the difficulties facing people who live with severe and enduring mental disturbance, and fail to address the political, economic and social factors which fuel discrimination.
This chapter begins with the controversial 1988 founding of an AIDS care centre in Rome: the Villa Glori Casa famiglia per malati di AIDS, or simply the Casa famiglia. It examines the discussion that this centre sparked in the Italian media, and media depictions of HIV/AIDS in circulation more generally at the time in Italy, including the language surrounding HIV/AIDS in official
control of pregnant Muslim bodies like Safoora Zargar's amidst the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Registration of Citizens (NRC) Bills 3 reflects the reproductive landscape in the larger political and moral economy of the country. Media narratives have revealed that the VGV programme thrives in a context of commercialising Ayurveda, validating it through the claims of RSS leaders who (apparently) met Germans who reminded them of the glorious Indian past and the techniques in Ayurveda to
began working with a fertility specialist in Cape Town, and her agency for third-party egg provision launched in 2002. Her agency would recruit young local women, largely for international clientele. The agency paid egg providers ZAR10,000 (~ US$1000 in 2002). The agency came under fire from media, the local fertility industry, and regulators. The media labelled it ‘egg safaris’ and made references to surrogacy as a form of slavery (Brits, 2004 ). The South African Society for Reproductive Medicine and Gynaecological Endoscopy (SASREG), a
In Psychoanalysis and the family, Richard Bates reveals the striking range and extent of the influence of Françoise Dolto (1908–88) – child psychoanalyst and France’s leading authority on parenting and family dynamics from the 1970s onwards.
Against the backdrop of rapid economic, social and cultural change, Dolto emerged as a new, reassuring, national presence. Seen as a national treasure, her views proved influential on a wide range of issues linked to psychology, parenting, education, gender, sexuality, bioethics and children’s culture and rights. Dolto claimed the mantle of a progressive, innovative expert who swept away outdated concepts – but Bates demonstrates that her ideas in fact had deep roots in right-wing, anti-feminist currents. Dolto used her media platforms and the cultural authority of psychoanalysis to ensure that her psychoanalytic vision affected the whole French nation and was implanted in a variety of institutional settings. Bates shows how her vision had lasting repercussions, in areas ranging from the treatment of autism to the organisation of children’s centres.
In demonstrating Dolto’s importance, this highly original, thoroughly researched book makes an essential contribution to historical understanding of twentieth-century French society. It forces a reassessment of the place of psychoanalysis in French social history, showing that its true significance lay well beyond the academic seminar or the consulting room.
Over the past four decades, three processes took place that reflect the emergence of violence as a public health problem in Latin America. First, these decades witnessed an increase in the volume of scientific literature related to violence, as well as in a range of publications by national and international organisations. Second, institutions focused on monitoring violence-related situations were designed. Lastly, violence appeared as a mainstream topic on the public agenda, in media debates and as a key structuring component in the representations of the population. This chapter analyses the emergence of violence as a public health problem in Argentina, from a constructivist approach. Tensions between the different explanations of this phenomenon are considered. Is the establishment of this topic in the public sphere explained by the rise of violence indicators? To what extent do statistical fluctuations explain the rise of public problems? A document analysis was conducted, reviewing papers, international organisation publications, reports and newspaper articles. This chapter typifies two mainstream approaches which explain the emergence of violence as a public health problem. Objectivist perspectives are described, characterised by interpreting public problems as a mechanical consequence of patterns in society. Perspectives which relativise the relation between the existence of a problem and its manifestations are studied. Both discourses illustrate transformations in the public health field, such as the incorporation of youth as a key actor in the understanding of violence, the conceptualisation of violence as a health issue and a shift from top-down to bottom-up policies to address this phenomenon.