Jane M. Ussher is Professor of Women's Health Psychology, and director of Gender Culture and Health Research at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. She is author of a number of books. Her current research focuses on women's sexual and reproductive health, with particular emphasis on premenstrual experiences, gendered issues in caring, and sexuality and fertility in the context of cancer.

Drawing on academic and clinical experience, including case studies and in-depth interviews, as well as on the now extensive critical literature in the field of mental health, Jane Ussher presents a critical multifactorial analysis of women's madness that both addresses the notion that madness is a myth, and yet acknowledges the reality and multiple causes of women's distress.

1. The Madness of Women: Myth or Experience? 2. The Daughter of Hysteria: Depression as a "Woman's Problem"? 3. Labelling Women as Mad: Regulating and Oppressing Women. 4. Woman as Object, not Subject: Madness as Response to Objectification and Sexual Violence. 5. The Construction and Lived Experience of Women's Distress: Positioning Premenstrual Change as Psychiatric Illness. 6. Women's Madness: Resistance and Survival.