Laurel Braitman, "The Animal Inside"

Dr. Laurel Braitman is a New York Times bestselling author, historian and anthropologist of science. She is currently a Writer-in-Residence at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the Stanford University School of Medicine and a Contributing Writer for Pop Up Magazine.  She holds a PhD in Science, Technology and Society from MIT and is a Senior TED Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Wired and other publications. Her last book, Animal Madness, (Simon & Schuster 2015) was a NYT bestseller and has been translated into seven languages. Her next book (forthcoming, Simon & Schuster) is about medicine, family and mortality. She's taught popular interdisciplinary courses at the Stanford School of Medicine, Harvard, MIT, Smith College and elsewhere and is passionate about working with musicians, physicians, scientists, and artists. Her work and these collaborations have been featured on the BBC, NPR, Good Morning America and Al Jazeera and elsewhere. Laurel lives on a houseboat in Sausalito, CA with her dog Cedar, a long-eared mutt who's not at all impressed by her work.

The Animal Inside

 Beginning in the late 19th century, changing conceptions of relatedness between people and other animals (and animals' assumed susceptibilities to mental or emotional distress) – were influenced by debates over what it meant to be both human and sane in Britain and the United States. In this talk, Braitman will draw on her historical, partly-ethnographic, investigation of animal insanity in various times and places in the Anglo-American world from the late I9th century through the early 21st, to argue that identifying animal madness, insanity, nervous disorders, anxiety disorders, phobias, depression, obsessive compulsivities, suicidal behaviors and more, has not only served as a way of affixing meaning to puzzling animal behavior, but has been used to denote borders (or lack thereof) between certain groups of humans and certain groups of animals. As with other divisions (eg. race, gender, nationality or class), opinions about which humans and which other animals could experience particular forms of insanity have been used to justify certain forms of treatment or mistreatment, rationalize needs for confinement or freedom, or determine what sorts of people and other creatures were deserving of rights and to what degree. Braitman will discuss the ways that historical attempts to identify emotional phenomena from melancholy and suicidal behavior in horses and monkeys, to, more recently, obsessive-compulsivity in parrots and PTSD in military dogs, demonstrates that other animals have acted as mirrors and proxies for disordered Anglo-American minds for more than a century. This has had wide-ranging effects on diagnostic and therapeutic practices in humans and other animals alike. Braitman will also touch on her experiences sharing these stories with a broad public audience and her various collaborations with musicians, visual artists and others to plumb the questions at the heart of our relationships with nonhuman animals: how alike are we? How do we know? And why do our similarities matter?