We will home in on some of those 'critical periods' as well as exploring ideas about the impact of women's lives and social condition on their mental wellbeing. This seminar engages critically with this literature and also raises the issue of female agency – did women form alliances with their doctors, did they use medical diagnoses and labels (such as hysteria) for their own purposes, and did they even shape the views of those treating them? Female adolescence and the onset of menstruation was regarded as a particularly vulnerable period, as was the childbearing epoch and menopause. Rather less has been produced on masculinity and mental breakdown though this is changing. The apparent association between female biology and reproduction and mental disorder has been a particularly rich area of analysis, as has interest in hysteria which emerged as something of a professional obsession in the 19 th century. Numerous historians have engaged themselves with the question of whether psychiatry, particularly 19 th-century psychiatry, discriminated against women, or at least singled women out as especially vulnerable to being categorised as mentally ill and confined in asylums.
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