The Muse Asylum


Book Description

“An ingeniously plotted postmodernist mystery. . . . David Czuchlewski writes with imagination, vision, and style.”—Joyce Carol Oates Who is Horace Jacob Little, and what is he trying to hide? Legend has is that not even his agent had met him, that they communicated via post office box. Horace Jacob Little had insisted on blank covers for all his books. . . . No one knew what he looked like or where he lived. . . . I used to imagine him: a death-row inmate, a mild-mannered accountant, a disfigured cripple. . . . He was none of these, as it turned out, nothing my imagination could conjure. Andrew Wallace, recent Princeton graduate and troubled genius, spends his days in the Overlook Psychiatric Institute—the Muse Asylum—writing about a dark conspiracy against him engineered by the elusive author Horace Jacob Little. When fellow classmate Jake Burnett, a novice reporter, arrives on the hospital grounds to visit Andrew, he learns that Andrew’s problems run much deeper than simple paranoia and obsession. Along with Lara Knowles, the girl they both love, they try to break through the shadows of the enigmatic Horace Jacob Little. Instead, they find themselves caught in a twisted game of reflections and reversals, where each seems to be pursuing the other—for love, for success, or for a far more sinister purpose. “[A] cleverly devised, sharply composed, entertaining and moving novel.”—The Wall Street Journal




Committed


Book Description

Between 1902 and 1934, the United States confined hundreds of adults and children from dozens of Native nations at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, a federal psychiatric hospital in South Dakota. But detention at the Indian Asylum, as families experienced it, was not the beginning or end of the story. For them, Canton Asylum was one of many places of imposed removal and confinement, including reservations, boarding schools, orphanages, and prison-hospitals. Despite the long reach of institutionalization for those forcibly held at the Asylum, the tenacity of relationships extended within and beyond institutional walls. In this accessible and innovative work, Susan Burch tells the story of the Indigenous people—families, communities, and nations, across generations to the present day—who have experienced the impact of this history.




Lords of Asylum


Book Description

Waylaid in the wilds, they left him for dead... Sir Luther Slythe Krait is a bad man. He struggled to outrun his past, but vengeance is swift and relentless and rides on unceasing wings. Lord Pyotr Raachwald's son was slain in a ritual rife with black magic. His legacy lies shattered. His purpose ruined. And with the killer at large, all he has left, revenge, lingers just beyond reach. Plunged into a civil war, Sir Luther is compelled into the Gallow Lord's service. Can Sir Luther play him off against another power-mad lord long enough to unmask the truth behind the son's murder? Hunt down the killer? Bring him to justice? Or will he just die trying? Waylaid in the wilds, they left him for dead, just not dead enough... Lords of Asylum is Game of Thrones meets The Maltese Falcon. Find out why Arina from Rockstarlit Book Asylum Fantasy Book Blog says This book was a f**king masterpiece.'




Beyond the Asylum


Book Description

This book is a must-read for any specialist in the history of colonial and post-colonial psychiatry, as well as a fantastic case study for those interested in the social history of European colonialism more generally.― Choice Claire Edington's fascinating look at psychiatric care in French colonial Vietnam challenges our notion of the colonial asylum as a closed setting, run by experts with unchallenged authority, from which patients rarely left. She shows instead a society in which Vietnamese communities and families actively participated in psychiatric decision-making in ways that strengthened the power of the colonial state, even as they also forced French experts to engage with local understandings of, and practices around, insanity. Beyond the Asylum reveals how psychiatrists, colonial authorities, and the Vietnamese public debated both what it meant to be abnormal, as well as normal enough to return to social life, throughout the early twentieth century. Straddling the fields of colonial history, Southeast Asian studies and the history of medicine, Beyond the Asylum shifts our perspective from the institution itself to its relationship with the world beyond its walls. This world included not only psychiatrists and their patients, but also prosecutors and parents, neighbors and spirit mediums, as well as the police and local press. How each group interacted with the mentally ill, with each other, and sometimes in opposition to each other, helped decide the fate of those both in and outside the colonial asylum.




La Castañeda Insane Asylum


Book Description

La Castañeda Insane Asylum is the first inside view of the workings of La Castañeda General Insane Asylum--a public mental health institution founded in Mexico City in 1910 only months before the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. It links life within the asylum's walls to the radical transformations brought about as Mexico entered the Revolution's armed phase and then endured under succeeding modernizing regimes. Author Cristina Rivera Garza brings the history of La Castañeda asylum to life as inmates, doctors, relatives, and others engage in dialogues on insanity. They discuss faith, sex, poverty, loss, resentment, envy, love, and politics. Doctors translated what they heard into the emerging language of psychiatry, while inmates conveyed their personal experiences and private histories through expressions of mental suffering. The language of pain--physical and spiritual, mild to excruciating--allowed patients to detail the sources and consequences of their misfortune. Available now for the first time in English, this edition contains updated sources and features a note by the translator, Laura Kanost.




My Tour through the Asylum


Book Description

“[A] testament to his journey toward South Carolina’s—not only desegregation of schools—but full integration and voice for African American students.” —Libby Bernardin, author of Stones Ripe for Sowing Immortalized in the writings of his most famous student, bestselling author Pat Conroy, veteran education administrator William E. Dufford has led an inspirational life as a stalwart champion for social justice and equal access for all to the empowerment of a good public education. A quintessential Southern storyteller now in his nineties, Dufford reflects on his own transformation through education, from his upbringing in the segregationist Jim Crow Era-South of the 1930s and 1940s to becoming an accomplished integrationist revered by his pantheon of former colleagues and students. In My Tour through the Asylum, several of these supporters share their own candid recollections of Dufford alongside his life story, adding context and anecdotes to the narrative. Dufford credits the evolution of his mindset from segregationist to integrationist to the good influence of two experiences: his service in the US Navy in the 1940s opening his eyes to a larger worldview and his later doctoral training at the University of Florida under nationally recognized professors introducing him to global perspectives of education. Drawing the book title and themes from nineteenth-century statesman James Louis Petigru’s infamous assessment that South Carolina was “too small to be a republic and too big to be an insane asylum,” Dufford offers an insightful, pragmatic, and ultimately hopeful tour through his lived experiences in the courageous, committed service of education and enlightenment. “William Dufford’s memoir is a remarkable example of courage, passion, and determination.” —Peggy B. Winder, Newberry College




A New Health and Care System


Book Description

This book asks one of the key questions for future UK society: how do we make our health care and public services more successful and sustainable? In Escaping the Invisible Asylum, Alex Fox outlines a new model for public services that offer long-term support to adults, based on the overarching goal of achieving and maintaining wellbeing, rather than only reacting to crises or attempting to "fix" people. The author draws on the experience and unique perspective gained through his leadership of the Shared Lives movement.




Nightmare Factories


Book Description

How the insane asylum came to exert such a powerful hold on the American imagination. Madhouse, funny farm, psychiatric hospital, loony bin, nuthouse, mental institution: no matter what you call it, the asylum has a powerful hold on the American imagination. Stark and foreboding, they symbolize mistreatment, fear, and imprisonment, standing as castles of despair and tyranny across the countryside. In the "asylum" of American fiction and film, treatments are torture, attendants are thugs, and psychiatrists are despots. In Nightmare Factories, Troy Rondinone offers the first history of mental hospitals in American popular culture. Beginning with Edgar Allan Poe's 1845 short story "The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether," Rondinone surveys how American novelists, poets, memoirists, reporters, and filmmakers have portrayed the asylum and how those representations reflect larger social trends in the United States. Asylums, he argues, darkly reflect cultural anxieties and the shortcomings of democracy, as well as the ongoing mistreatment of people suffering from mental illness. Nightmare Factories traces the story of the asylum as the masses have witnessed it. Rondinone shows how works ranging from Moby-Dick and Dracula to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Halloween, and American Horror Story have all conversed with the asylum. Drawing from fictional and real accounts, movies, personal interviews, and tours of mental hospitals both active and defunct, Rondinone uncovers a story at once familiar and bizarre, where reality meets fantasy in the foggy landscape of celluloid and pulp.




Refuge in a Moving World


Book Description

Refuge in a Moving World draws together more than thirty contributions from multiple disciplines and fields of research and practice to discuss different ways of engaging with, and responding to, migration and displacement. The volume combines critical reflections on the complexities of conceptualizing processes and experiences of (forced) migration, with detailed analyses of these experiences in contemporary and historical settings from around the world. Through interdisciplinary approaches and methodologies – including participatory research, poetic and spatial interventions, ethnography, theatre, discourse analysis and visual methods – the volume documents the complexities of refugees’ and migrants’ journeys. This includes a particular focus on how people inhabit and negotiate everyday life in cities, towns, camps and informal settlements across the Middle East and North Africa, Southern and Eastern Africa, and Europe.




Images of Immigrants and Refugees in Western Europe


Book Description

Perception and representation of newcomers and immigrants The topic of migration has become particularly contentious in national and international debates. Media have a discernable impact on overall societal attitudes towards this phenomenon. Polls show time and again that immigration is one of the most important issues occupying people’s minds. This book examines the dynamic interplay between media representations of migrants and refugees on the one hand and the governmental and societal (re)actions to these on the other. Largely focusing on Belgium and Sweden, this collection of interdisciplinary research essays attempts to unravel the determinants of people’s preferences regarding migration policy, expectations towards newcomers, and economic, humanitarian and cultural concerns about immigration’s effect on the majority population’s life. Whilst migrants and refugees remain voiceless and highly underrepresented in the legacy media, this volume allows their voices to be heard. Contributors: Leen d’Haenens (KU Leuven), Willem Joris (KU Leuven), Paul Puschmann (KU Leuven/Radboud University Nijmegen), Ebba Sundin (Halmstad University), David De Coninck (KU Leuven), Rozane De Cock (KU Leuven), Valériane Mistiaen (Université libre de Bruxelles), Lutgard Lams (KU Leuven), Stefan Mertens (KU Leuven), Olivier Standaert (UC Louvain), Hanne Vandenberghe (KU Leuven), Koen Matthijs (KU Leuven), Kevin Smets (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Jacinthe Mazzocchetti (UC Louvain), Lorraine Gerstmans (UC Louvain), Lien Mostmans (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), and François Heinderyckx (Université libre de Bruxelles) Ebook available in Open Access. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content). With thanks to the funding provided by Belspo (Belgian Science Policy Office), as part of the framework programme BRAIN-be (Belgian Research Action Through Interdisciplinary Networks), contract nr BR/165/A4/IM2MEDIATE.