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 health, mental and/or health:
“A major misunderstanding of child rearing has been the idea that meeting a childs needs is an end in itself, for the purpose of the childs mental health. Mothers have not understood that this is but one step in social development, the goal of which is to help a child begin to consider others. As a result, they often have not considered their children but have instead allowed their childrens reality to take precedence, out of a fear of damaging them emotionally.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (18591930)
“The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast- off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)