Many Forms of Madness

In telling the story of her son's thirty-year struggle with schizophrenia, Ruether lays bare the inhumane treatment throughout history of people with mental illness. Despite countless reforms by "idealistic reformers" and an enlightened understanding that mental illness is a physical disease like any other, conditions for people who struggle with mental illness are little improved. Ruether asks why this is so and then goes on to imagine what we would do for people with mental illness "if we really cared."

Rosemary Radford Ruether is Carpenter Professor of Feminist Theology Emerita, Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley and Visiting Scholar at the Claremont Graduate University and School of Theology. She is the author of numerous influential works in feminist theology and the history of theology, including Women and Redemption: A Theological History (1998).