Women cut and starve themselves pop pills and purge and slyly hit the gin

Women cut and starve themselves, pop pills and purge and slyly hit the gin. Men bottle their emotions, deny the despair and the damage, then blow a fuse. Knives, fists, rage, whisky, hard drugs and suicide: this is the terrain of which bewildered relatives whisper, “He just went mad.” Male lunacy is a big marauding beast on the psychiatric safari, whereas the female variety is a pet cobra, harboured in the bosom.This also probably explains why men with psychiatric disorders are seldom viewed as sexually desirable, while women in the throes of madness often are. The veils that obscure the extent of a woman’s instability exude a powerful sense of mystery.

Indeed Elizabeth Speller’s memoir is compelling in her candid examination of the fact that her allure was intensified in men’s eyes by periods of mental fragility.I first became keenly aware that madness in a woman might not be viewed as entirely undesirable when I was a student at Oxford in the late 1980s. The Gallic shag-fest Betty Blue was a seminal film for my generation. You soon came to understand that any male undergraduate with pretensions to the arts was looking for a sultry sack-artist who renounced such dreary qualities as reason, humour, kindliness and restraint, and might ultimately prove her lunatic credentials by gouging out a chunk of flesh. I suspected several female contemporaries of affecting their bruised demeanour and hurling of crockery to better enhance their bid to be a femme fatale. It was hard not to slap some lovelorn male friends with their Pavlovian refrains of, “I’d better go after her – I don’t know what she’ll do.” “Read Tatler in bed with a packet of Hobnobs until you turn up, you deluded sap,” I often thought.But there were plenty of other women who had no need to strain for effect; their less flamboyant aberrations weren’t so highly prized, however. Brilliant girls whose quest for academic excellence was undermined by a crippling lack of self-confidence, who rocked sobbing in lavatory cubicles at the Bodleian Library.

Females whose intellectual and social insecurities were sublimated to a pitched battle over food, while their wasting and bingeing took place behind closed doors. The most severely affected trudged back and forwards between tutorials and the Warneford psychiatric hospital, leaving little space for relationships. In any case, anorexia is often linked to the rejection of puberty and womanhood, while bulimia is frequently rooted in self-loathing. Neither is conducive to revealing your body to another person.I too binged and vomited throughout my student years, though I have to admit I wasn’t a very convincing bulimic and even gained weight. I lacked the discipline to ensure every last bit of food was purged.