The black dog and the bulldog

Mark Grimsely, whose stylish and prolific War Historian has been putting a lot of other academic bloggers to shame, has a post on Churchill's depression and the stigma of mental illness:

Notwithstanding Churchill's example and that of many others known to have had mental illnesses of various sorts -- to say nothing of "normal" individuals -- when it comes to explaining the views and behavior of historical actors, historians still tend to avoid psychology as an analytical tool. ... [Much of it may come from the assumption] that highly functional people cannot, by definition, have significant mental or emotional disorders. Or to frame it in the reverse, that people with such disorders reveal crippling weaknesses that unfit them for significant historical agency.

| Posted by Wilson at 14:44 Central | TrackBack
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