Pictures in historical chapters of textbooks convey information about the values and assumptions of the authors’professions and the larger culture. We scrutinized 15 recent abnormal psychology textbooks for reproductions of art created before 1900. Thirteen works appeared in three or more textbooks. Overall, these pictures support a “Whiggish” account of history that celebrates the present and gives a distorted, incomplete rendering of the past. The 13 pictures tended to depict the mentally ill as an underclass who are released from their (...) literal and metaphorical shackles by men who are “ahead of their time” in their struggles against prevailing ignorance. The pictures also emphasized the difference of the mentally ill by presenting a catalogue of stereotypic visual elements attributed to insanity throughout Western history. We argue for the inclusion in textbooks of “history for the sake of the past” as a way of genuinely engaging different ideologies and thereby stimulating interest in our own implicit values and biases. (shrink)

Content analysis of three chapters of Jamison’s memoir, An Unquiet Mind, shows that depression, mania, and Bipolar Disorder have a common metaphoric core as a sequential process of suffering and adversity that is a form of malevolence and destruction. Depression was down and in, while mania was up, in and distant, circular and zigzag, a powerful force of quickness and motion, fieriness, strangeness, seduction, expansive extravagance, and acuity. Bipolar Disorder is down and away and a sequential and cyclical process that (...) partakes of the metaphors of its component moods. We conclude that metaphors of mood disorders share a number of structural features and are consistent across different authors. (shrink)