History of Psychiatry recent issues

The development of old age psychiatry in Britain from the 1960s until 1989

2009-05-20

Creating order. A quantitative analysis of psychiatric practice at the Swiss mental institutions of Burgholzli and Rheinau between 1870 and 1970

Meier, M. — 2009-05-20

This paper analyses the concepts of order and normality underlying the daily psychiatric practice of two Swiss mental health institutions between 1870 and 1970, based on a representative random sample of 1330 patient records from the two state institutions in the Canton of Zurich. The quantitative analysis covers the types of psychiatric measure taken in these cases, as well as the rationales behind them. It is concluded that the order of the institution, of society and, above all, the order of gender played an important role in the choice and implementation of various measures.

Encountering hysteria: doctors' and patients' perspectives on hysteria in Denmark, 1875--1918

Mollerhoj, J. — 2009-05-20

The history of hysteria stretches over several millennia and contains a plethora of different understandings and interpretations. This paper focuses on a central part of its Danish history, from the last decades of the nineteenth-century `age of nervousness' until the end of World War I. It is argued that the understanding and negotiation of hysteria and its explanations took place in a complex interaction between doctors and their patients. Whereas the psychiatrists during this period moved towards an understanding of hysteria as a functional disorder, the patients, of whom approximately one-third were male, maintained that their illness was of somatic origin, and closely related to social, economic and working conditions.

Bethlem's Irish: migration and distress in nineteenth-century London

Bhavsar, V., Bhugra, D. — 2009-05-20

Association between migration and mental illness is widely reported. This study aimed to gain insight into the mental health of Irish migrants into Britain in the years 1843—53. Casebooks from the period were examined for Irish ethnicity, and clinical profiles were compared with those of age-matched control samples. Irish-born patients were found to have a greater proportion of diagnoses of mania than controls (p ≤ 0.01). They were more likely to be admitted for 12 months or longer (p ≤ 0.001) and more likely to receive religious attributions for illnesses by the treating physician. The more common diagnosis of mania in the Irish group can be explained in terms of the effects of migration, differences in idioms of distress, or in terms of prejudice.

Emergency compulsory admissions in the Netherlands: fluctuating patterns in Rotterdam, 1929--2005

Wierdsma, A. I. — 2009-05-20

This paper identifies the social changes and developments in public mental health that have contributed to fluctuations in the use of emergency compulsory admissions in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Annual reports and administrative data over the years 1929—2005 indicate the impact of general and local factors. Demographic changes and statutory regulations were important general factors, but do not explain particular swings in the number of compulsory admissions. Key local factors were: the availability of alternative arrangements such as emergency centres and sheltered homes; an interpretation of the criteria for compulsory admissions shared by all disciplines involved; and better collaboration between services. These factors suggest that if the increasing use of compulsory admissions is to be reversed, a coordinated effort is needed.

The abolition of capital punishment: contributions from two nineteenth-century Italian psychiatrists

Peloso, P. F., Dening, T. — 2009-05-20

Capital punishment was the source of lively debate in Italy, from unification in 1861 until 1888. The precedent for abolishing the death penalty had been set in Tuscany in 1786. This paper presents the arguments put forward by two eminent psychiatrists who opposed the death penalty, Carlo Livi and Andrea Verga. Livi set out his scientific case for abolition in two addresses given to the Accademia dei Fisiocritici in Siena in 1862. In 1889 Verga wrote a commentary on the Senate sitting and argued in favour of approving the Italian Penal Code. Verga agreed with Livi's arguments and disagreed with the School of Criminal Anthropology, led by Cesare Lombroso and Raffaele Garofalo, who were both in favour of capital punishment.

How Scottish was R. D. Laing?

Miller, G. — 2009-05-20

R. D. Laing was indebted, although not exclusively or uncritically, to his early Scottish intellectual context. He engaged, for instance, throughout his life with the ideas of the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray. Despite the relative lack of scholarship on twentieth-century Scottish thought, it is possible to trace Laing's participation in a tradition of the importation and translation of Continental ideas (exemplified by scholars such as the theologian Ronald Gregor Smith). Laing adapted Continental ideas to a particularly Scottish concern with psychotherapy as a form of demythologized Christianity; this is apparent in his latent affinity with the Scottish psychoanalyst W. R. D. Fairbairn, and also in his explicitly Christian reconceptualization of the Jungian concept of metanoia.

`Hebephrenia. A contribution to clinical psychiatry'

Hecker, E., Kraam, A. — 2009-05-20

Book Review: Edward Shorter and David Healy (2007) Shock Therapy: A History of Electroconvulsive Treatment in Mental Illness (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press). Pp. xii + 382. ISBN 978-0-813-54169-3

Freeman, H. — 2009-05-20

Book Review: Jack Drescher and Joseph P. Merlino (eds) (2007) American Psychiatry and Homosexuality: An Oral History (New York and London: Harrington Park Press). Pp. xx + 299. US$49.95 (hbk); US$29.95 (pbk). ISBN 978-1-56023-738-9 (hbk); 978-1-56023-739-6 (pbk)

Waters, C. — 2009-05-20

Book Review: Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds (2008) Sexual Inversion: A Critical Edition, edited by Ivan Crozier (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan). Pp. vii + 351. {pound}60.00. ISBN 978-0-230-00803-8

Hekma, G. — 2009-05-20

Research on the history of psychiatry

2009-05-20

Correction

2009-02-12

The establishing of Norwegian child psychiatry: ideas, pioneers and institutions

Ludvigsen, K., Seip, A. A. — 2009-02-12

In this article we analyse the central features of the establishment and development in Norway of a mental health service for children. Influenced by the movements for mental hygiene and child guidance from the 1920s, Norwegian psychiatrists turned their attention increasingly towards prevention of mental and social problems. During the 1930s, IQ-testing and segregation of troublesome children from school became an important tool for handling children with mental or behavioural problems. With increasing public attention, child mental health activities grew from the late 1940s, and the first regular therapeutic clinic for children was established in 1947. Therapeutic ideas derived from psychoanalytical theory and applied in the new clinics, challenged the dominant view of segregation as a solution to mental and social problems. From 1961 a comprehensive mental healthcare service for children was developed in Norway, and the aim of therapeutic treatment changed gradually from segregation to integration.

Neurosis: aspects of its conceptual development in the nineteenth century

Koppe, S. — 2009-02-12

The concept of `neurosis' does not have a very high priority in the history of psychiatry. The very few studies of the historical development of the concept are discussed, especially that of Pienero. The relations between psychiatry and neurology in the nineteenth century are described to provide a background for the constitution of the concept; its relationships to `psychic shock' and `psychic paralysis' are also analysed.

Folie a plusieurs: forensic cases from nineteenth-century Ireland

Kelly, B. D. — 2009-02-12

Folie à plusieurs is a syndrome in which two or more individuals share symptoms (e.g., delusions). This paper uses archival material to present and discuss forensic psychiatric cases of folie à plusieurs from nineteenth-century Ireland. The cases of three brothers who all `became insane at the same time' and killed another brother illustrate: the role of organic factors in folie à plusieurs; the use of `moral management' strategies; and the problem of tuberculosis in asylums. The case of one woman whose family `all became insane at once' and killed one of her sons illustrates: the importance of identifying the `primary' patient; the difficulties experienced by `secondary' cases; and the limited therapeutic progress achieved in nineteenth-century asylums. While further historical study is required to explain the emergence of the concept of folie à plusieurs in the late nineteenth century, it is clear that, over one hundred years since the term came to prominence, `communicated insanity' still presents substantive diagnostic, clinical and ethical challenges to mental health and judicial services.

Problems with retrospective studies of the presence of schizophrenia

Fraguas, D., Breathnach, C.S. — 2009-02-12

Studies concerning the presence of schizophrenia in the distant past are controversial. Some authors maintain that schizophrenia-like illnesses existed in antiquity, while others argue that this is quite doubtful. Imprecise definition of schizophrenia, imposition of the current concept of schizophrenia onto the past, difficulties in interpreting ancient texts describing schizophrenia-like conditions, and cultural variables involved in the clinical definition of schizophrenia underlie these controversies. This article reviews the methodological issues that arise in such retrospective studies of schizophrenia.

`Splitters and lumpers': Samuel Johnson's tics, gesticulations and reverie revisited

Rousseau, G. — 2009-02-12

Medical diagnosis, even in psychiatry, has been made principally by `splitters' and `lumpers': those who separate categories of explanation and those who combine them. This paper, the text of an annual lecture delivered to a national British medical society, charts the detailed psychiatric diagnosis of one of Western civilization's most illustrious men of letters, Samuel Johnson, and explains how it was constructed in the last century. The aim is to provide a case study documenting the divergent methodologies of `splitters' and `lumpers' in practice.

Classic Text No. 77 `Hebephrenia. A contribution to clinical psychiatry' by Dr. Ewald Hecker in Gorlitz (1871)

Kraam, A. — 2009-02-12

When Kahlbaum reluctantly allowed his disciple Hecker to write the paper on hebephrenia no one could foresee that it would be one of the few psychiatric concepts that would still be relevant today, for three reasons. First, it is still included in major current psychiatric classification systems. Second, some authors believe that it signifies a particularly malignant form of schizophrenia with an early onset and poor prognosis. Third, its introduction coincided with increased interest in age of onset of psychiatric disorders and proved to be a sensitive marker for the emergence of child psychiatry as a specialty. Until now, only excerpts of Hecker's seminal paper have been available in English; this is the first complete translation including all case reports and letters.The seven cases and accompanying letters formed a crucial part of Hecker's paper. Readers can now, for the first time, judge for themselves why it had such a tremendous impact beyond nineteenth-century German psychiatry.

Book Review: Sloan Mahone and Megan Vaughan (eds) (2007) Psychiatry and Empire (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan). Pp. ix + 244. {pound}45.00. ISBN 978-1-4039-4711-6

Crozier, A. — 2009-02-12

Book Review: Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield (2007) The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Pp. xiii + 287. ISBN 978-0-19-531304-8

Tranter, R. — 2009-02-12

Book Review: Harry Whitaker, C. U. M. Smith and Stanley Finger (eds) (2007) Brain, Mind and Medicine: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Neuroscience (New York: Springer). Pp. vii + 376. {pound}36.00. ISBN 978-0-387-70966-6

Casper, S. — 2009-02-12

Book Review: Petteri Pietikainen (2007) Neurosis and Modernity: The Age of Nervousness in Sweden (Leiden and Boston: Brill). Pp. xiii + 391. $99.00. ISBN 978-90-04-16075-0

Lundberg, A. — 2009-02-12

Book Review: Jeremy Schmidt (2007) Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England (Aldershot, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate). Pp. 217. {pound}55.00. ISBN 978-0-7546-5748-4

Hodgkin, K. — 2009-02-12

Research on the history of psychiatry: Dissertation Abstracts, 2007 (Part 1)

2009-02-12

`These strangers within our gates': race, psychiatry and mental illness among black Americans at St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, 1900--40

Gambino, M. — 2008-11-18

During the early decades of the twentieth century, William Alanson White and the medical staff at St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, developed an ambitious programme for US psychiatry wherein the profession would dedicate itself to the reconstitution of mentally-fit and socially-productive American citizens. The racist assumptions beneath this programme led most physicians at the institution to expect little more than deference, dependence and common labour from their black patients, preventing them from comprehending the impact of substandard and racially-segregated care. Black men and women were acutely aware of the injustices they faced. When they rejected elements of the hospital's medical regimen, these patients were also rejecting a social vision that consigned them to the margins of US civic life.

Asylum and community: the Athens Lunatic Asylum in nineteenth-century Ohio

Ziff, K. K., Thomas, D. O., Beamish, P. M. — 2008-11-18

This paper examines the role of the village of Athens, Ohio, USA, in the founding and operation of the Athens Lunatic Asylum during the nineteenth century. Taking as its sources official, personal and popular culture documents, the paper focuses on the function of this Asylum as a participant in the economy of its surrounding community. The Athens Lunatic Asylum was deeply connected with its community, functioning as a market for local goods and services as well as an employer. Connections between the Asylum and the community were supported by a physical infrastructure of transportation and utilities as well as a political infrastructure that operated locally and at the state level. Implications for mental health care and for community are proposed.

The introduction of the concept of dementia praecox into Spain, 1902--19

Plumed Domingo, J. J. — 2008-11-18

Edited by Dr Tom Dening

Modern psychiatry has been shaped by Emil Kraepelin's nosological revolution. Historiography, accordingly, has taken an interest in how his ideas on psychiatry were introduced in different countries. This article will analyse the introduction of dementia praecox into Spanish psychiatry and its relationship with the theoretical debate taking place there at the time in the context of Spanish psychiatric care and institutions.

Managing the `unmanageable': interwar child psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital, London

Evans, B., Rahman, S., Jones, E. — 2008-11-18

When opened as a post-graduate teaching and research hospital in 1923, the Maudsley made virtually no provision for the treatment of children. Yet its children's department saw sustained growth during the interwar period. This expansion is explored in relation to novel behaviourist hypotheses and the forging of formal links with local government and charitable bodies. The recruitment of psychologists, educators and specialist social workers fostered a multidisciplinary approach through case conferences. This development would structure the theoretical origins of child psychiatry, in particular influencing the role and interpretation of psychoanalytic theory within it. The theoretical orientation of child psychiatry and the practical treatment of children represented an area of dynamic change and innovation at a time when adult psychiatry struggled to discover effective treatments or achieve breakthroughs in causal understanding.

Psychosurgery in Italy, 1936--39

Kotowicz, Z. — 2008-11-18

In 1936 Egas Moniz introduced a new method for treating mental illness — psychosurgery. This new procedure was taken up immediately in a number of countries, including Italy. In most countries its introduction was slow and the numbers of operations were in single figures, but in Italy the introduction was rapid and around a dozen neuropsychiatrists reported much higher numbers of operations performed. Also in Italy the first innovations to the technique, notably the transorbital variation, were introduced. Moreover, all these activities took place without any sign of the protest seen elsewhere. Conditions that allowed the acceptance of this risky procedure seemed to be a consequence of the way in which the professions of neurology and psychiatry had been merged in Italy.

Classic Text No. 76: 'Asthenia' by A. Dechambre (1865)

Berrios, G.E. — 2008-11-18

The word asthenia has been used to name descriptive and explanatory concepts, hypothetical functional states, symptoms, syndromes and diseases; and on occasions it has been considered a synonym of adynamia, aboulia, feeling of fatigue, weakness, and lack of energy; for a time it was even the official antonym of `sthenia'.

Because at its core it refers to the (hypothetical) want of some driving element, asthenia has from the start been parasitical upon foundational concepts such as `force' and `energy'. For example, following the popularization of Newton's concept of force, asthenia was redefined as a failure in vital impetus (the biological version of the Newtonian idea).This alliance of asthenia with vitalism lasted up to the middle of the 19th century, by which time the new concept of energy had come to the fore and asthenia was dutifully redefined as a lack of `physiological' or `psychological' energy.

The 1850s also witnessed the arrival in medicine and psychiatry of the belief that subjective experiences are epistemologically informative. Soon enough asthenia was to become a new name for general (reported) feelings of tiredness, fatigue or aboulia and ceased to be defined on the basis of interactions between hypothetical stimuli and individual diathesis as it had been in the work of Hippocrates, Boissier de Sauvages, John Brown and others.

However, defining asthenia on the basis of subjective experiences caused a blurring of boundaries which invited the construction of new `clinical disorders' such as neurasthenia, psychasthenia and the `pathologies of energy'. This medicalization of tiredness culminated in the emergence of the notorious `chronic fatigue syndrome' (CFS) which contained many of the conceptual vices of the past. The epistemology and social role of CFS will not be understood until the history of the concept of asthenia from which it directly derives is adequately studied.

Book Review: Rhodri Hayward (2007) Resisting History: Religious Transcendence and the Invention of the Unconscious (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Pp. xi + 147. {pound}40.00. ISBN 978-0-7190-7414-1

Thomas, P. — 2008-11-18

Book Review: Nancy D. Campbell (2007) Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). Pp. 301. $50.00. ISBN 978-0-472-11610-2

Dyck, E. — 2008-11-18

Book Review: Susan K. Morrissey (2007) Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Pp. xv + 384. {pound}55.00. ISBN 978-0-521-86545-6

Houston, R.A. — 2008-11-18

Book Review: Carla Yanni (2007) The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press). Pp. xi + 191. ISBN 978-0-8166-4940-2

Edginton, B. — 2008-11-18

The syndrome of accident proneness (Unfallneigung): why psychiatrists did not adopt and medicalize it

Burnham, J. C. — 2008-08-15

In the World War I period, psychologists in Britain and Germany independently and simultaneously originated the idea of accident proneness (Unfallneigung). This distinctive syndrome of suffering a series of accidents was logically attractive for psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, especially as a pattern of unconsciously motivated deviant and self-destructive behaviour. Yet except for some mid-twentieth-century interest by psychosomatics specialists, psychiatrists did not systematically embrace the syndrome except occasionally as a symptom of other psychiatric conditions, thus showing that there were limits to the extent to which twentieth-century psychiatrists would medicalize patterns of behaviour.

Alexander Crichton on the psychopathology of the passions

Charland, L. C. — 2008-08-15

Alexander Crichton (1763—1856) made significant contributions to the medical theory of the passions, yet there exists no systematic exegesis of this particular aspect of his work. The present article explores four themes in Crichton's work on the passions: (1) the role of irritability in the physiology of the passions; (2) the manner in which irritability and sensibility contribute to the valence, or polarity, of the passions; (3) the elaboration of a psychopathology of the passions that emphasizes their physiological form rather than meaningful content or connections; and (4) the insistence that medical science ought to ignore ethical and other `moral' psychological and social aspects of the passions.

The provision of mental health services in England for people over 65 years of age, 1970--78

Hilton, C. — 2008-08-15

The twentieth century saw an increasing number of people living into old age, and consequently a higher prevalence of age-related chronic degenerative brain disorders. By 1971 the mental hospitals were almost half full with people over 65 years of age. Thus plans to close the mental hospitals meant that the development of community mental health services for older people was a necessity. Although there was a multi-disciplinary focus on the care of older people, the lead in service development was largely taken by psychiatrists, both individually and through the Group for the Psychiatry of Old Age at the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

On unsafe ground: the practices and institutionalization of Danish psychiatry, 1850--1920

Mollerhoj, J. — 2008-08-15

The aim of this paper is to characterize the efforts of late nineteenth-century Danish psychiatrists to have their field recognized as a discipline in its own right, and their fight to be accepted as practitioners of science, following common scientific standards of exactness and proof. This struggle took place on two fronts: with colleagues in the somatic branches of medicine, and also with lay people and the general public. According to the psychiatrists, laymen persistently contested psychiatry's legitimacy in diagnosing and treating mentally ill patients. Criticism of its scientific objectivity made it difficult for psychiatry to gain respect on an equal footing with other branches of medicine.

Electrotherapy and mental illness: then and now

Gilman, S. L. — 2008-08-15

Today electrotherapy has reappeared as a therapy of choice for the treatment of depression and other forms of mental illness. It had de facto vanished from allopathic medicine from the 1920s to the end of the century. The debates about electrotherapy mirror the question of whether mental illness was somatic and to be treated by somatic means or psychological to be treated with psychotherapy. Sigmund Freud's move from an advocate to an opponent of electrotherapy is exemplary for a shift in attitude and the decline of electrotherapy. With the re-somaticization of mental illness over the past decades has come the reappearance of somatic therapies such as electrotherapy.

`Essay on a classification of different genera of insanity' by J. Baillarger (1853)

Berrios, G.E. — 2008-08-15

Less well known than some of his contemporaries, Jules Baillarger (1809—90) tends to be celebrated by `who said it first' writers as the man who assisted the `birth of bipolar disorder'. This view is based on the anachronistic claim that Baillarger's `insanity with a double form', Kraepelin's `das manisch-depressive Irresein', Leonhard's concept of Bipolarität and DSM-IV's `Bipolar I and Bipolar II' Disorder somehow constitute an incremental approximation to the same `disease'. Baillarger is important because he was a high profile conceptual interlocutor in the great 19-century debates on hallucinations, hypochondria, language disorders, General Paralysis of the Insane, cretinism and goitre. Classic Text No. 75 is a translation of Baillarger's important 1853 paper on the classification of madness, and it is a good illustration of the popular method of top-to-bottom psychiatric taxonomy. Written before psychiatrists felt the need to conceal the theoretical nature of the exercise behind a farrago of `empirical evidence', it shows how hidden assumptions govern the way in which the boundaries of mental disorders are actually drawn.

Book Review: Roberta Bivins and John V. Pickstone (eds) (2007) Medicine, Madness and Social History: Essays in Honour of Roy Porter (Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Pp. x + 295. {pound}55.00. ISBN 10: 0-230-52549-0

Smith, L. — 2008-08-15

Book Review: Penny Coleman (2006) Flashback, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide, and the Lessons of War (Boston, MA: Beacon Press). Pp. xiii + 223. {pound}11.99. ISBN 978-0-8070-5041-5

Jones, E. — 2008-08-15

Book Review: Joseph Melling and Bill Forsythe (2006) The Politics of Madness: The State, Insanity, and Society in England, 1845-1914 (London: Routledge). Pp. 278. ISBN 978-0-415-30174-9

Suzuki, A. — 2008-08-15

Book Review: Jesse F. Ballenger (2006) Self, Senility and Alzheimer's Disease in Modern America: A History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press). Pp. 236. ISBN 0-8018-8276-1

Ball, C. — 2008-08-15

Book Review: Leslie Topp, James E. Moran and Jonathan Andrews (eds) (2007) Madness, Architecture and the Built Environment. Psychiatric Spaces in Historical Context (New York: Routledge). Pp xii + 346, 39 Illus. {pound}65.00. ISBN 0-415-37529-0

Piddock, S. — 2008-08-15