Juana La Loca - 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:  Juana La Loca

Famous quotes containing the words mental and/or health:

    “Women ought to feel a peculiar sympathy in the colored man’s wrong, for, like him, she has been accused of mental inferiority, and denied the privileges of a liberal education.”
    —Angelina Grimké (1805–1879)

    “The fact that the mental health establishment has equated separation with health, equated women’s morality with soft-heartedness, and placed mothers on the psychological hot seat has taken a toll on modern mothers.”
    —Ron Taffel (20th century)