History Of Madness And Psychiatry

After beginning his historical work in Switzerland in the 1950s and then continuing it in the United States at the Menninger Foundation, Henri Ellenberger (1905–1993) became the leading historian of " dynamic psychiatry ". This expression commonly denotes mental medicine that draws from psychotherapeutic practices and psychological theories to improve our understanding of mental diseases and to cure them. Although still used today, usually in juxtaposition to 19th century alienism or to biological psychiatry, the origin and meaning of this expression are unclear. An unpublished lecture (1956) by Ellenberger on this subject, accompanied by an explanatory introduction, is reproduced here to shed light on Ellenberger's interpretation of that term. This article additionally aims to draw certain parallels and distinctions between Ellenberger, Michel Foucault and George Devereux's teaching in the 1950s. Considering that the history of psychiatry is now a well-established speciality in the academic world, Ellenberger's lecture is also an original document which enables us to trace the professionalization of psychiatric historiography as an academic discipline back to its beginnings after World War II.

The history of the mental hospital in Delhi is a fascinating story. Set up in colonial times, the asylum in Delhi seems
to reflect the tumultuous and chaotic history of the city itself. It was perhaps established in the early 19th century, and
functions till 1857, when it is ransacked in the Mutiny. It is subsequently merged with the asylum at Lahore in 1861,
set up again, and incredibly, closed again at the turn of the century. Subject to the whims of administrators and policy
makers, the asylum then ceases to exist till the 1960s when a new avatar appears. In it’s non continuity is the story of
the neglect of mental illness.

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

This book is OPEN ACCESS and available for download on JSTOR and other online repositories (see attached link to Cornell Press page and JSTOR DOI).

Institutionalizing Gender analyzes the relationship between class, gender, and psychiatry in France from 1789 to 1900, an era noteworthy for the creation of the psychiatric profession, the development of a national asylum system, and the spread of bourgeois gender values.

A history of the United States' systematic expulsion of "undesirables" and immigrants, told through the lives of the passengers who travelled from around the world, only to be locked up and forced out aboard America's first deportation trains.

The United States, celebrated as a nation of immigrants and the land of the free, has developed the most extensive system of imprisonment and deportation that the world has ever known. The Deportation Express is the first history of American deportation trains: a network of prison railroad cars repurposed by the Immigration Bureau to link jails, hospitals, asylums, and workhouses across the country and allow forced removal with terrifying efficiency. With this book, historian Ethan Blue uncovers the origins of the deportation train and finds the roots of the current moment, as immigrant restriction and mass deportation once again play critical and troubling roles in contemporary politics and legislation.

A century ago, deportation trains made constant circuits around the nation, gathering so-called "undesirable aliens"—migrants disdained for their poverty, political radicalism, criminal conviction, or mental illness—and conveyed them to ports for exile overseas. Previous deportation procedures had been violent, expensive, and relatively ad hoc, but the railroad industrialized the expulsion of the undesirable. Trains provided a powerful technology to divide "citizens" from "aliens" and displace people in unprecedented numbers. Drawing on the lives of migrants and the agents who expelled them, The Deportation Express is history told from aboard a deportation train. By following the lives of selected individuals caught within the deportation regime, this book dramatically reveals how the forces of state exclusion accompanied epic immigration in early twentieth-century America. These are the stories of people who traveled from around the globe, only to be locked up and cast out, deported through systems that bound the United States together, and in turn, pulled the world apart. Their journey would be followed by millions more in the years to come.

University of California Press, 2021

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This biographical book originates as part of a broader research program on the history of medicine in Nazi Germany and the social context of the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trials of 1947, as well as questions on the forced migration of Jewish physicians in the 1930s and 1940s that Paul Weindling, the Welcome Trust Research Professor at the Oxford Centre for Health, Medicine, and Society, has pursued over the past decades. His scholarship has already been reflected in substantial monographic publications, including "Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism" (1989) and "Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: From Medical Warcrimes to Informed Consent" (2004). These books have examined major themes including human experimentation in the context of racial anthropology and eugenics ideas, as well as the development of the concept of “informed consent” during the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial that pursued medical misconduct during the Second World War and the crimes against humanity committed by Nazi physicians.

In tracing how research and experiments around such concepts as learned helplessness, deferred gratification, hyperactivity, and emotional intelligence migrated into popular culture and government policy, Staub reveals long-standing and widespread dissatisfaction—not least among middle-class whites—with the metric of IQ. He also documents the devastating consequences—above all for disadvantaged children of color—as efforts to undo discrimination and create enriched learning environments were recurrently repudiated and defunded. By connecting psychology, race, and public policy in a single narrative, Staub charts the paradoxes that have emerged and that continue to structure investigations of racism even into the era of contemporary neuroscientific research.

Madness stalked the colony of New South Wales, and tracing its wild path changes the way we look at our history. Bedlam at Botany Bay is a series of stories about what happened when people went mad in this place, told through the magnificent correspondence of tireless colonial secretaries, the cautious and brazen language of lawyers and judges and firebrand politicians, and by siblings, parents, friends, and the mad themselves. It is not a history of the miserable institutions built for the mad, or those within them, or the people in charge of them. These stories of madness are woven together into a narrative about freedom and possibilities, and collapse and unravelling. It is a new story of colonial Australia, cast as neither a grim and fatal shore nor an antipodean paradise, but a place where the full range of humanity wrestled with the challenges of colonisation. They were divorced from those held dear and from familiar environments, enjoyed spectacular freedoms, and laboured under the burden of their ambitions. They faced the bleakness of failure, the effects of their violence, and the strangeness of life amidst an exiled majority and the structures put in place to discipline them – surrounded by the clank of pickaxes and leg irons, the voices of the poor and uneducated, and the self-righteous chattering of those who ‘came free’.

Early in the twentieth century, Russia was experiencing a decadent period of cultural degeneration just as science was developing ways to identify medical conditions which supposedly reflected the health of the entire nation. Leonid Andreev, the leading literary figure of his time, stepped into the breach of this scientific discourse with literary works about degenerates. The spirited social debates on mental illness, morality and sexual deviance which resulted from these works became part of the ongoing battle over the definition and depiction of the irrational, complicated by Andreev’s own publicised bouts with neurasthenia.

This book examines the concept of pathology in Russia, the influence of European medical discourse, the development of Russian psychiatry, and the role that it had in popular culture, by investigating the life and works of Andreev. It engages the emergence of psychiatry and the role that art played in the development of this objective science.

24 octobre 1871, 3 heures du matin, maison de santé d’Evere. Laurent Dumoulin, interné la veille dans cet établissement destiné à l’accueil de ceux que l’on dit alors « aliénés », est pris d’un accès de fureur. Se sentant menacé par ses compagnons de chambrée, il terrasse deux de ceux-ci, qui trouvent la mort sous ses coups. Les conséquences dramatiques de cette rixe mènent à l’ouverture d’une instruction judiciaire, qui met en évidence une longue série de défaillances dans la gestion de l’asile.
Au fil de cet ouvrage, l’histoire de la maison de santé d’Evere est retracée, depuis ses débuts exemplaires peu de temps après la promulgation, en 1850, de la première loi belge en matière de prise en charge des aliénés, jusqu’aux poursuites. Un instantané de l’asile est reconstitué au moyen du volumineux dossier judiciaire de ce que l’on a rapidement nommé « l’affaire d’Evere » ainsi que d’autres sources, parmi lesquelles les archives de l’établissement. Une place importante est laissée aux témoignages, qui offrent un éclairage brut sur ce que pouvait être le quotidien dans cette institution au début des années 1870. Ce que révèle l’enquête, largement médiatisée, émeut profondément l’opinion. L’affaire fait scandale et la seule réponse judiciaire apparaît tout à fait insuffisante. Les médecins aliénistes saisissent l’occasion pour faire valoir des revendications qu’ils portent depuis quelque temps déjà et auxquelles les abus constatés à Evere semblent donner raison. L’aile progressiste du parti libéral tente quant à elle d’imposer une réforme ambitieuse, qui aurait pour effet de responsabiliser davantage l’État belge dans la prise en charge des aliénés. Depuis le procès de l’affaire jusqu’à la promulgation de la nouvelle loi en 1873, ce sont donc aussi les multiples réactions provoquées par le scandale qui sont envisagées.

This article employs a mad transdisciplinary approach to autoethnography to detail vulvodynia — or chronic vulvar pain — within the system of (dis)ability. Through autoethnography, the self operates as a mobile orientation from which to identify and disrupt the colonial rationalities that differentially construct and narrate vulvodynia across sites of madness and disability. Through historical, discursive, and autoethnographic analysis, I locate vulvodynia’s role in various processes of subject, race, and settler-state formation from the nineteenth century up to the neoliberal present.

This paper examines how the cultural obsession with madness and the anti-psychiatry movement’s critique of “normalcy” during the 1960s reshaped legal theory and the disciplines of sociology, psychology, and anthropology, and informed anti-war, black liberation, and sexuality and
disability rights struggles.

[AMAZON LINK BELOW TO BOOK ITSELF -- TOC and book intro in downloadable .pdf] 

"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it." --John Steinbeck Scientific research confirms what people have always known: answers, ideas, and inspiration do come to us in dreams. Harvard psychologist and world-renowned dream specialist Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., offers this rich collection of examples of how the world's most creative practitioners in art, music, film, science, literature and other fields have used the revelations of their dream life to inform their work. Dr. Barrett offers insights showing us how to encourage lucid, meaningful dreaming, and how to apply the meanings of our dreams to solving problems--from the everyday to the extraordinary. This is the stuff dreams are made of. In the visual arts, Jasper Johns couldn't find his unique artistic vision until he dreamed it in the form of a large American flag. Salvador Dali and his colleagues built the startling new genre of surrealism out of dreams. Kubla Kahn dreamed the design for his stately pleasure dome; thousands of years later, Lucy Davis, chief architect at a major firm, continues the tradition of dreaming designs into life in her extraordinary buildings. Film is a fertile avenue for dreams: "Twice I have transferred dreams to film exactly as I had dreamed them," confides director Ingmar Bergman, as have Federico Fellini, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman, and John Sayles. From Mary Shelley's terrible nightmare, which became Frankenstein, to Stephen King's haunting dream as a little boy, which led to his first bestseller, countless writers have consulted the Committee. Musicians from Beethoven to Billy Joel and Paul McCartney have whistled the Committee's tunes. In science, physiologist Otto Loewi dreamed the medical experiment that earned him the Nobel Prize. In sports, Marion Jones dreamed she'd broken a world record, then brought the dream to life. Gandhi translated his dream of resistance into a movement that changed the world. Since Freud, we take it for granted that our dreams reflect our past. In The Committee of Sleep, Barrett reveals how dreams can also tell us about our future potential--and how to reach it.

As public awareness of antidepressant medication surged in the 1990s, Lauren Slater’s Prozac Diary became the quintessential auto-pathography, documenting her life with major depression and her dramatic “cure” with the wonder-drug Prozac. However, Slater’s pronounced ambivalence about the drug’s side effects and her treatment was largely ignored by a culture swept up by Prozac enthusiasm. Slater’s more recent “metaphorical memoir,” Lying, on the other hand, is not so easily appropriated. A parody of the illness narrative, a pathological pathography, Lying is the dark sister text of Prozac Diary – Slater’s subversion of the autobiographical conventions and imperatives of the genre. Slater, who is both a psychologist and a patient, writes in the antipsychiatric tradition of David Rosenhan’s “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” the infamous 1973 study in which sane “pseudopatients” were incorrectly diagnosed with mental illnesses after feigning symptoms. By becoming a patient himself, Rosenhan called into question the seemingly discrete categories of sane and insane and revealed the structuring power of psychiatric labels. In a similar fashion, Lying, an autobiography about epilepsy, challenges and defies readers’ expectations for truth and transparency in memoir and underscores the central role of the patient’s story and the metaphorical nature of illness itself. Lying is a literary form of hysteria, a conversion evoking the complicated past of women, mental illness, and the authenticity of psychiatric diagnoses.

“Paradigm shift” has become a catchphrase in contemporary psychiatric dis- course. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (1962/2012) once wrote that when a paradigm shift occurs,

[...] scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before. It is rather as if the professional community had been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well. (p. 111)

[...] The invited authors of this series of special issues are researchers and practitioners who are paving the way toward diagnostic alternatives, that is, alternatives that might lead to a true paradigm shift in the theory and practice of psychiatric diagnosis. These distinguished authors are dedicated to authentically addressing the scientific and ethical dilemmas posed by the current system. Some provide critiques of the current system and syntheses of the current research, while others propose new models for research and practice that privilege the voices of those with lived experience (see Flanagan, Davidson, & Strauss, 2010).

Charting a transatlantic movement of so-called 'dynamic psychiatry' during the early twentieth century, this paper reads against the grain of established historiographies. Comparing biographical and autobiographical sources with contemporary correspondence, a history is told which considers the evolution of psychiatric knowledge and clinical practices 'from below'. Revealing a period and place when a 'dynamic' counter-culture challenged the established materialist views of Scottish psychiatry, the longevity of this challenge is considered in the concluding paragraphs.

PALABRAS CLAVE: Homeland, Sully, Clint Eastwood, locura, compromiso,
héroe

Mediante el análisis de algunas escenas seleccionadas del último capítulo de la sexta temporada de Homeland y de la película Sully, reflexiono sobre el origen etimológico del término “compromiso” y su relación con la figura del héroe. ¿Son ámbitos diferenciados, irreconciliables o, en momentos determinados, él héroe puede lidiar con cierta locura que implicaría la realización del acto heroico, de un compromiso con su sociedad?.

KEYWORDS: Homeland, Sully, Clint Eastwood, madness, engagement, hero

Through the analysis of selected scenes from the last chapter of Homeland's sixth season and the film Sully, I reflect on the etymological origin of the term “commitment” and its relation to the hero‟s character. Do they belong to different or irreconcilable areas, or at certain moments, can the hero deal with a certain madness that would imply the accomplishment of the heroic act, of a commitment to his/her society?.

A challenge to biomedical psychiatry, this survivor-driven educational guide embodies a far reaching re-visioning of the ontology of madness and the pharmaceuticals used to intervene in it. From the description:

"This guide brings together the best information we’ve discovered and lessons we’ve learned at The Icarus Project and Freedom Center. It is not intended to persuade anyone to stop taking psychiatric medications, but instead aims to educate people about their options if they decide to explore going off.

In a culture polarized between the pro-medication propaganda of pharmaceutical companies on the one hand, and the anti-medication agenda of some activists on the other, we offer a harm reduction approach to help people make their own decisions.We also present ideas and information for people who decide to stay on or reduce their medications.

Many people do  nd psychiatric drugs helpful and choose to continue taking them: even with the risks, this may be a better option given someone’s situation and circumstances.At the same time, psychiatric drugs carry great dangers and can sometimes do terrible harm, even becoming bigger problems than the conditions they were prescribed to treat.Too often, people who need help getting off psychiatric drugs are left without guidance, and medication decisions can feel like  nding your way through a labyrinth.We need honest information that widens the discussion, and we hope this guide helps people trust themselves more and take better care of one another."

presente dissertação discorre sobre a loucura em suas diferentes modulações e como possibilidade de construção de uma saúde na interlocução com a produção de possíveis através dos procedimentos artísticos. Para tanto, nos valemos do conceito de ausência de obra como plano comum à loucura e à arte em relação com o fora para a concepção do discurso menor da loucura no cerne do discurso maior da razão. Com isto, a linguagem interdita da loucura passa a funcionar por auto-implicação, abrindo a experiência para o múltiplo e o fragmentário. Este procedimento se dá em detrimento do ordenamento de mundo assentado na unidade e na razão apontado por Foucault na noção normalização, que designa o atravessamento do poder sobre a vida que incute em homogeneização do campo. Por outro lado, abordamos em Canguilhem uma concepção de normatividade orientada para a vida como valor maior, posicionamento que propicia uma compreensão de saúde a partir de variabilidade e da singularidade. Auxiliados pelos conceitos de impessoal, de fora, de trágico e de pequena saúde, tomamos a transgressão dos limites do eu e da linguagem na ressurgência da desrazão no pensamento e na experiência enquanto possibilidade de suspensão dos vínculos que ligam obra e sujeito, exercendo um deslocamento dos campos que reúnem por exclusividade a loucura ao patológico.

This chapter focuses on the Weimar period (1919)(1920)(1921)(1922)(1923)(1924)(1925)(1926)(1927)(1928)(1929)(1930)(1931)(1932)(1933) and the German mental hospital (Staatskrankenanstalt) Hamburg-Langenhorn. It examines the wider political and social factors that impacted on work therapy. Emphasis will be on how patients perceived their role as inmates, how they reacted to work therapy and how they dealt with an uncertain future on their discharge from the institution. Case records as well as documents written by the patients themselves will be used to engage with several questions concerning the role of patient work during the 1920s.

Reading List: The first topic examined is, “Mad Annals: Consistent Attempts at Reform and Abolition throughout the History of Institutions”. The second topic is “On the Road toward Liberation: Slavery, Oppression, Racism, and the Black Power Movement”. Both of these topics are prefaced with a selection of readings to introduce a) the way I look at their dimensionalized realities using the lens of Environmental Psychology in Mental Institutions, and b) the frame of reference, or “Theoretical Frameworks” that are relied on to formulate the organization of materials found. http://www.laurentenney.us/files/106765547.pdf