This book chronicles the conceptual and methodological facets of psychiatry and medical psychology throughout history. There are no recent books covering so wide a time span. Many of the facets covered are pertinent to issues in general medicine, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and the social sciences today. The divergent emphases and interpretations among some of the contributors point to the necessity for further exploration and analysis.

This book chronicles the conceptual and methodological facets of psychiatry and medical psychology throughout history. There are no recent books covering so wide a time span. Many of the facets covered are pertinent to issues in general medicine, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and the social sciences today. The divergent emphases and interpretations among some of the contributors point to the necessity for further exploration and analysis.

This book chronicles the conceptual and methodological facets of psychiatry and medical psychology throughout history. There are no recent books covering so wide a time span. Many of the facets covered are pertinent to issues in general medicine, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and the social sciences today. The divergent emphases and interpretations among some of the contributors point to the necessity for further exploration and analysis.

This book offers a general introduction to historical sources in the history of psychiatry, delving into the range of sources that can be used to investigate this dynamic and exciting field. The chapters in this volume deal with physical sources that might be encountered in the archive, such as asylum casebooks, artwork, material artefacts, post-mortem records, more general types of source including medical journals, literature, public enquiries, and key themes within the field such as feminist sources, activist and survivor sources. Offering practical advice and examples for the novice, as well as insightful suggestions for the experienced scholar, the authors provide worked-through examples of how various source types can be used and exploited and reflect productively on the limits and constraints of different kinds of source material. In so doing it presents readers with a comprehensive guide on how to ‘read’ such sources to research and write the history of psychiatry. Methodically rigorous, clear and accessible, this is a vital reference for students just starting out within the field through to more experienced scholars experimenting with new and unfamiliar sources in the history of medicine and history of psychiatry more specifically. Chapters 4, 8, 9, 10, and 13 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. They have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book brings together leading international authorities - physicians, historians, social scientists, and others - who explore the many complex interpretive and ideological dimensions of historical writing about psychiatry. The book includes chapters on the history of the asylum, Freud, anti-psychiatry in the United States and abroad, feminist interpretations of psychiatry's past, and historical accounts of Nazism and psychotherapy, as well as discussions of many individual historical figures and movements. It represents the first attempt to study comprehensively the multiple mythologies that have grown up around the history of madness and the origin, functions, and validity of these myths in our psychological century.

"Between Sanity and Madness: Mental Illness from Homer to Neuroscience traces the extensive array of answers that various groups have provided to questions about the nature of mental illness and its boundaries with sanity. What distinguishes mental illnesses from other sorts of devalued conditions and from normality? Should medical, religious, psychological, legal, or no authority at all respond to the mentally ill? Why do some people become mad? What treatments might help them recover? Despite general agreement across societies regarding definitions about the pole of madness, huge disparities exist on where dividing lines should be placed between it and sanity and even if there is any clear demarcation at all. Various groups have provided answers to these puzzles that are both widely divergent and surprisingly similar to current understandings"--