Angelica schuyler hamilton quotes7/6/2023 ![]() ![]() Her mind protected her from her trauma and grief by stopping the clock just before his death. I wonder if she didn’t end up in a long-term dissociative state: it’s entirely possible she had either a dissociative fugue, or long-term dissociative amnesia, where she simply forgot that Philip had died. This makes me think schizophrenia is also unlikely. She is withdrawn from the world because of her illness, as well as by it. There’s no mention of her seeing, hearing or experiencing things that aren’t there. Her childlike demeanour and interests, the sudden onset of her illness as the result of a traumatic event, her seeming inability to interact with changes in the world and what seems to have been a pronounced regression stuck at a specific point in the past, don’t look like psychosis. ![]() I’m not a psychiatrist or psychologist, but I am both a medical librarian and a historian, so I hope I have a little insight to share here. It talks about an explosion caused when someone “deranged the joint on the gas stove”, meaning they knocked it out of place. ![]() Something had broken.Ī good example is a coroner’s report cited in Dr Suzannah Lipscomb’s documentaries on dangerous technological advances in the Victorian home. Rather than the image of aggressive or challenging behaviour we link it with today, it simply meant something wasn’t where it should be. One writer describes her as ‘deranged’, but this would have had a different meaning in the Victorian era. In letters of the time, and in her nephew’s (a psychiatrist) writings, she is described variously as childlike, stuck in a past world, and very modest and diffident in her demeanour, rather than the agitation we might find in someone struggling with racing thoughts or hallucinations. It’s been posited by other folks on here that she developed schizophrenia I think (with the caveat that we will never really know, and that diagnosing historical figures with modern criteria is tautological) it’s something very different. After her brother Philip’s death in a duel, it’s said she retreated into a childlike emotional state after a breakdown. A friend of mine put me onto the story of Angelica Hamilton, the eldest daughter of Alexander and Eliza. ![]()
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