Joanna of Castile - Mental Health

Mental Health

Most historians now agree that she had melancholia, severe clinical depression, a psychosis, or a case of inherited schizophrenia. There is debate about the diagnosis that she was mentally ill considering that her symptoms were aggravated by non-consensual confinement and control by others who had assumed her royal powers. To legitimize the claims of her husband, father, and son to the throne, Joanna was nominalized as Queen regnant of Castile, León, and Aragon until her death. It is possible that she inherited mental illness from her mother's family: her maternal grandmother Isabella of Portugal, Queen of Castile suffered from it in widowhood after her stepson exiled her to the castle of Arévalo in Ávila, Castile.

Read more about this topic:  Joanna Of Castile

Famous quotes containing the words mental and/or health:

    For the child whose impulsiveness is indulged, who retains his primitive-discharge mechanisms, is not only an ill-behaved child but a child whose intellectual development is slowed down. No matter how well he is endowed intellectually, if direct action and immediate gratification are the guiding principles of his behavior, there will be less incentive to develop the higher mental processes, to reason, to employ the imagination creatively. . . .
    Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)

    Many women who used to be full-time mothers are discovering that outside work gives them friends, challenges, variety, money, independence; it makes them feel better about themselves, and therefore lets them be better parents.
    —Wendy Coppedge Sanford. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, introduction (1978)