Deinstitutionalizing the history of contemporary psychiatry

Abstract

While contemporary mental health services have been marked by the burgeoning of outpatient and preventive care, the historiography of psychiatry remains largely tied to the study of custodial and palliative treatment.The work in which contemporary psychiatry has been involved cannot be adequately understood as a singular, autonomous enterprise based in a residential facility. It has become a technoscience that operates in numerous settings and alongside multiple sciences, technologies and decision-makers. This paper explores what it might mean to 'deinstitutionalize' the history of contemporary psychiatry by examining the case of social therapy for sex offenders in West Germany.

Historical Perspectives on Mental Health and Psychiatry

“…This is the revolution in evidence-based medicine, with the standardisation of evaluation methods, as well as the formalisation of quality assurance, efficiency metrics, interdisciplinary teams and randomised controlled trials (see also Chapter 17). 36 In the 1960s, drug trials had simply meant clinical observations. As one psychiatrist involved in early trials of drugs for schizophrenia recalled, There was no blinding and no randomization.…”

Introduction to Special Issue: Psychiatry as Social Medicine

“…In recent decades, historians of psychiatry have examined in greater detail the contestation of diagnostic and therapeutic categories inside and outside of institutions of mental health, by a wide variety of actors outside of the medical profession (Grob 1991 ; Eghigian 2011 ). These textured accounts of the social worlds contained within the history of psychiatry and the mind sciences pay closer attention to the intersections of gender, class, and race (Burch 2016 ; Hirshbein 2009 ; Lunbeck 1994 ; Metzl 2009 ), using methodologies drawn not only from social and cultural history (Pietikainen 2007 ) but also broader analytics drawn from environmental studies, disability studies, and postcolonial studies (Doroshow, et al 2019 ).…”

Race, alcohol and general paralysis: Emil Kraepelin’s comparative psychiatry and his trips to Java (1904) and North America (1925)

“…Narratives that focus strictly on carceral institutions are increasingly losing their persuasive force as historians shift their attention away from psychiatric hospitals and towards the extramural dimensions of psychiatric work and experience. These developments have prompted one commentator to speak of the need to 'deinstitutionalize' psychiatric historiography (Eghigian, 2011). Similarly, growing interest in transnational psychiatry seems to be eclipsing institutional psychiatric historiography.…”