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In 1989, Gert van Rooyen and Joey Haarhoff abducted and murdered six young girls, with no trace of their bodies ever found. The crimes occurred during a period of social breakdown in South Africa, marked by disillusionment with the Dutch Reform Church and the emergence of vast conspiracy theories. Gert was a known paedophile, and…
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Helen Flanders Dunbar, the mother of psychosomatic medicine, was an outstanding pioneer whose life was to end tragically. A brilliant academic career led her to becoming an authority on Danté, a leading psychosomaticist who studied the healing shrines and one of the first to promote the work of clerics in hospitals. She did several large…
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Over ten weeks in Whitechapel in the Autumn 1888, five women (the ‘Canonical Five’) were brutally murdered by a mutilating serial killer. The murders represented a new form of killing. Jack the Ripper, the accepted metaphor for the killer, has become a cultural meme, with a new candidate surfacing every decade or so, without any…
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Dr Milton Rokeach brought together three psychotic patients at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan for a study. The patients had one notable feature: they all believed they were Jesus Christ. Rokeach specialised in belief systems: how people develop and keep (or change) their beliefs. Read the article to find out if the experiment was successful…
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The publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses on 2nd February 1922 was a seminal event in literature and modernism. Determined to write the defining novel of the new century, Joyce spent seven years writing a masterwork of realism and symbolism, written in a way that no one has ever managed to replicate. Joyce famously declared that…
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Evelyn Waugh, the finest English prose stylist of his time, was not an easy character who drank and used tablets at will, regardless of the consequences. The events that followed were described in his short novella The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, his most autobiographical work. The Pinfold character develops a full-blown psychosis with paranoid delusions,…
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Sigmund Freud described very few cases, but more details have come out over the years despite the efforts of the Freud estate to embargo embarrassing records. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, a leading historian of psychoanalysis, has described thirty-eight patients treated by Freud. He refrains from taking into account Freud’s interpretations, instead providing an account of how Freud…
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What is a psychiatric disorder? How do you distinguish madness from normal behaviour? The nomenklatura of American psychiatry follow a be fruitful-and-multiply approach, with every edition of the DSM – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual – proffering a dazzling array of new conditions. Where these disorders arise is a matter of contentious debate with a…
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Vere Gordon Childe, aged 65, the leading prehistorian of his day, died in a fall off Govetts Leap in the Blue Mountains of Australia. The manner of his death divided people. Those in contact with him during the five months of his return to Australia from the UK agreed with the coroner that the fall…
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In the sixties, RD “Ronnie” Laing was the most famous psychiatrist in the world. He became the leading figure of the British anti-psychiatry movement and a public celebrity. Laing saw existentialism as the explanation for the problem of psychosis, leading to alienation. He was the charismatic spokesman for an era that wanted to hear that…
