Between Sanity and Madness: Mental Illness from Ancient Greece to the

Since the earliest medical, philosophical, and literary texts in ancient civilizations, madness has posed some basic issues: how to separate sanity from insanity, to distinguish mental and bodily illnesses, and to specify the variety of internal and external forces that lead people to become mentally ill. This book explores the answers to these questions that have emerged over time and concludes that current portrayals are not much improved compared to those that emerged thousands of years ago. The puzzles that madness presents are likely to remain unresolved for the foreseeable future and perhaps forever.

Allan V. Horwitz is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University. He has published over 100 articles and chapters about various aspects of mental health and illness as well as nine books, including Creating Mental Illness (University of Chicago Press 2002), The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Misery into Depressive Disorder (Oxford University Press 2007 with Jerome Wakefield), All We Have to Fear (Oxford University Press 2012 with Jerome Wakefield), A Short History of Anxiety (Johns Hopkins University Press 2013), and PTSD: A Short History (Johns Hopkins University Press 2018). In 2006, he received the Leonard Pearlin Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to the Sociology of Mental Health and in 2016 the Leo G. Reeder Award for Lifetime Contributions to Medical Sociology, both from the American Sociological Association. He has been a Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (2007-2008) and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (2012-2013).