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A book subtitled ‘A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present’ is never going to be full of laughs, but Lisa Appignanesi’s engaging and important study, which weaves together intelligent discussion of trends in the talking cures with case-studies of both patients and doctors, manages to be as gripping as a thriller.  

Why have women always been more likely to suffer from mental illness? Though the question is never conclusively answered, it’s the underlying dilemma of the book. Motherhood, the desire (and right) to work and sexuality are prominent themes. It sounds like heavy going, but Appignanesi’s well-chosen examples – from Mary Lamb, temporarily and periodically treated after killing her mother in 1796, via Freud’s Dora and Marilyn Monroe to today’s Prozac-popping generation – bring this tough subject to life.

Appignanesi is keen to eschew painting women simply as crazy victims, however, and she avoids the obvious cliché of the oppressive patriarchal doctor. Instead she argues that all of us – patients and doctors, men and women – are a bit mad, bad and sad at some point in our lives.  

This is a calm, clever and compulsive book. If anything, the reader yearns for even more material than is contained in its 500-plus pages, particularly a more sustained comparison of women’s treatment with men’s. And it’s a shame that, besides unidentified black-and-white pictures marking the start of each section, the book is not illustrated. Perhaps this is a deliberate ploy to avoid voyeurism, but we want to see what the women we’re reading about looked like. Nonetheless, Appiganesi’s study is both rewarding and timely. You’d be mad not to read it.