Book Review: Dorinda Evans, Gilbert Stuart and the Impact of Manic Depression
(Source: History of Psychiatry)
Source: History of Psychiatry - March 4, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Park, M. Tags: Book Reviews Source Type: research
Book Review: Mical Raz, The Lobotomy Letters: The Making of American Psychosurgery
(Source: History of Psychiatry)
Source: History of Psychiatry - March 4, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Wickham, B. Tags: Book Reviews Source Type: research
Book Review: Daniel Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Anal
(Source: History of Psychiatry)
Source: History of Psychiatry - March 4, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Antic, A. Tags: Book Reviews Source Type: research
Book Review: Clark Lawlor, From Melancholy to Prozac: A History of Depression
(Source: History of Psychiatry)
Source: History of Psychiatry - March 4, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Haggett, A. Tags: Book Reviews Source Type: research
'Febrile Anxiety', by Robert James (1745): With an introduction by
The current class of psychiatric conditions called ‘Anxiety Disorders’ was constructed during the 20th century. Before 1900, its clinical components were conceptualized differently: some were not considered as diseases at all and others were looked after by physicians (not alienists). Whether it can be claimed that the complaints included under the ‘Anxiety Disorders’ have always existed, that is, constitute a form of ‘natural kind’, is a moot point that needs further historical investigation. This is because psychiatric complaints (mental symptoms) are no more than culturally configured...
Source: History of Psychiatry - March 4, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Berrios, G. Tags: Classic Text No. 97 Source Type: research
Karl Jaspers' phenomenology in the light of histological and X-ray metaphors
The study considers the origins of Karl Jaspers’ phenomenology. What did phenomenology mean to Jaspers and what was his personal perspective? What metaphors did he associate with it? This paper describes his phenomenological method by using the metaphors of histology and the X-ray. This perspective enables a better understanding, not only of the origins and essence of his phenomenology but also of its value for Jaspers himself. In Jaspers’ daily life, he would have been familiar with microscopes and X-ray machines. (Source: History of Psychiatry)
Source: History of Psychiatry - March 4, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Vlasova, O. A., Beveridge, A. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
When doctors cry wolf: a systematic review of the literature on clinical lycanthropy
This paper provides an overview and critical reassessment of the cases of clinical lycanthropy reported in the medical literature from 1850 onwards. Out of 56 original case descriptions of metamorphosis into an animal, only 13 fulfilled the criteria of clinical lycanthropy proper. The remaining cases constituted variants of the overarching class of clinical zoanthropy. Forty-seven cases involved primary delusions, and nine secondary delusions on the basis of somatic and/or visual hallucinations which may well have affected the patients’ sense of physical existence, also known as coenaesthesis. Cases of secondary delu...
Source: History of Psychiatry - March 4, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Blom, J. D. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Resilience of institutional culture: mental nursing in a decade of radical change
Mental nursing has continued to be neglected in the history of psychiatry. This paper considers the impact of a decade of radical developments on the role and outlook of nurses in British mental hospitals during the 1930s. The Mental Treatment Act 1930 introduced voluntary admission for early, supposedly treatable cases, although there was paucity of effective treatment. In the mid-1930s shock therapies, administered with great enthusiasm by asylum doctors, promised to cure insanity by physical means. Although these were important milestones in the progress of psychiatry, for the majority of nurses and patients life contin...
Source: History of Psychiatry - March 4, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: McCrae, N. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
'Rapid tranquillisation': an historical perspective on its emergence in the context of the development of antipsychotic medications
This paper examines factors involved in the theory and practice of emergency sedation for behavioural disturbance in psychiatry in the mid-twentieth century, and the emergence of the concept of ‘rapid tranquillisation’. The practice received little attention until the arrival of antipsychotic drugs, which replaced older sedatives and became the agents most strongly associated with the treatment of aggression and challenging behaviour. Emergency sedation was subsequently portrayed in psychiatric literature and advertising as a therapeutic and diagnosis-driven endeavour, and the concept of rapid tranquillisation ...
Source: History of Psychiatry - March 4, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Allison, L., Moncrieff, J. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Therapeutic Fascism: re-educating Communists in Nazi-occupied Serbia, 1942-44
This article probes the relationship between psychoanalysis and right-wing authoritarianism, and analyses a unique psychotherapeutic institution established by Serbia’s World War II collaborationist regime. The extraordinary Institute for compulsory re-education of high-school and university students affiliated with the Communist resistance movement emerged in the context of a brutal civil war and violent retaliations against Communist activists, but its openly psychoanalytic orientation was even more astonishing. In order to stem the rapid spread of Communism, the collaborationist state, led by its most extreme fasc...
Source: History of Psychiatry - March 4, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Antic, A. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Mental health, citizenship, and the memory of World War II in the Netherlands (1945-85)
After World War II, Dutch psychiatrists and other mental health care professionals articulated ideals of democratic citizenship. Framed in terms of self-development, citizenship took on a broad meaning, not just in terms of political rights and obligations, but also in the context of material, social, psychological and moral conditions that individuals should meet in order to develop themselves and be able to act according to those rights and obligations in a responsible way. In the post-war period of reconstruction (1945–65), as well as between 1965 and 1985, the link between mental health and ideals of citizenship ...
Source: History of Psychiatry - March 4, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Oosterhuis, H. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
The powers of suggestion: Albert Moll and the debate on hypnosis
The Berlin physician Albert Moll (1862–1939) was an advocate of hypnotic suggestion therapy and a prolific contributor to the medical, legal and public discussions on hypnotism from the 1880s to the 1920s. While his work in other areas, such as sexology, medical ethics and parapsychology, has recently attracted scholarly attention, this paper for the first time comprehensively examines Moll’s numerous publications on hypnotism and places them in their contemporary context. It covers controversies over the therapeutic application of hypnosis, the reception of Moll’s monograph Der Hypnotismus (1889), his re...
Source: History of Psychiatry - March 4, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Maehle, A.-H. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Acknowledgements
(Source: History of Psychiatry)
Source: History of Psychiatry - November 18, 2013 Category: Psychiatry Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Dementia praecox revisited
(Source: History of Psychiatry)
Source: History of Psychiatry - November 18, 2013 Category: Psychiatry Authors: McNally, K. Tags: News and Notes Source Type: research
Book Review: Deborah Weinstein, The Pathological Family: Postwar America and the Rise of Family Therapy
(Source: History of Psychiatry)
Source: History of Psychiatry - November 18, 2013 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Stewart, J. Tags: Book Reviews Source Type: research
