This book explores the relationship between socialist psychiatry and political ideology during the Cold War, tracing Yugoslav ‘psy’ sciences as they experienced multiple internationalisations and globalisations in the post-WWII period. These unique transnational connections – with West, East and South – remain at the centre of this book. The author argues that the ‘psy’ disciplines provide a window onto the complications of Cold War internationalism, offering an opportunity to re-think postwar Europe's internal dynamics. She tells an alternative, pan-European narrative of the post-1945 period, demonstrating that, in the Cold War, there existed sites of collaboration and vigorous exchange between the two ideologically opposed camps, and places like Yugoslavia provided a meeting point, where ideas, frameworks and professional and cultural networks from both sides of the Iron Curtain could overlap and transform each other. Moreover, the book offers the first analysis of East European psychiatrists’ contacts with and contributions to the decolonizing world, exploring their participation in broader political discussions about decolonization, anti-imperialism and non-alignment. The Yugoslav brand of East-West psychoanalysis and psychotherapy bred a truly unique intellectual framework, which enabled psychiatrists to think through a set of political and ideological dilemmas regarding the relationship between individuals and social structures. This book offers a thorough reinterpretation of the notion of ‘communist psychiatry’ as a tool used solely for political oppression, and instead emphasises the political interventions of East European psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

Mental Maps in the Era of Détente and the End of the Cold War recreates the way in which the revolutionary changes of the last phase of the Cold War were perceived by fifteen of its leading figures in the West, East and developing world.

For 20 years Soviet psychiatric abuse dominated the agenda of the World Psychiatric Association. It ended only after the Soviet Foreign Ministry intervened. Cold War in Psychiatry tells the full story for the first time and from inside, among others on basis of extensive reports by Stasi and KGB ¿ who were the secret actors, what were the hidden factors? Based on a wealth of new evidence and documentation as well as interviews with many of the main actors, including leading Western psychiatrists, Soviet dissidents and Soviet and East German key figures, the book describes the issue in all its complexity and puts it in a broader context. In the book opposite sides find common ground and a common understanding of what actually happened. ¿The use of psychiatry to silence political dissenters was undoubtedly one of the most pernicious sides of the Soviet regime. No wonder that the leaders of perestroika believed that stopping this criminal practice was one of the most urgent priorities. Robert van Voren¿s book is the very first full investigation of this problem. I highly recommend this book.¿ Anatoly Adamishin, former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR ¿Robert van Voren writes history in an innovative, effective, and vivid way. He weaves into the story of Western responses to the abuse of psychiatry in the USSR his probingly personal interviews with key players. Apart from presenting a skillfully interwoven succession of personal and institutional dramas, this book will also be valuable to students of the varied ways in which international professional bodies succeed or fail at upholding ethical standards of behavior by their members. In sum, this fast-paced and readable book combines the fruits of painstaking archival research with episodes of high-voltage human interest. It's hard to put down.¿ Peter Reddaway, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, George Washington University Robert van Voren (1959), a Sovietologist by education, has been a human rights activist since 1977 with a special interest in mental health issues. He is Chief Executive of the Global Initiative on Psychiatry (GIP) and has written extensively on Soviet issues and, in particular, issues related to mental health and human rights, and published a dozen books. His memoirs, On Dissidents and Madness, were published by Rodopi in 2009.

Making Mental Health: A Critical History historicises mental health by examining the concept from the ‘madness’ of the late nineteenth century to the changing ideas about its contemporary concerns and status. It argues that a critical approach to the history of psychiatry and mental health shows them to constitute a dual clinical-political project that gathered pace over the course of the twentieth century and continues to resonate in the present. Drawing on scholarship across several areas of historical inquiry as well as historical and contemporary clinical literature, the book uses a thematic approach to highlight decisive moments that demonstrate the stakes of this engagement in Anglo-American contexts. By tracing the (unfinished) history of institutions, the search for cures for psychiatric distress, the growing interest of the nation-state in mental health, the history of attempts to globalise psychiatry, the controversies over the politics of diagnostic categories that erupted in the 1960s and 1970s, and the history of theorising about the relationship between the psyche and the market, the book offers a comprehensive account of the evolution of mental health into a commonplace concern. Addressing key questions in the fields of history, medical humanities, and the social sciences, as well as in the psychiatry disciplines themselves, the book is an essential contribution to an ongoing conversation about mental distress and its meanings.

A capacious history of decolonization, from the decline of empires to the era of globalization Empires, until recently, were everywhere. They shaped borders, stirred conflicts, and set the terms of international politics. With the collapse of empire came a fundamental reorganization of our world. Decolonization unfolded across territories as well as within them. Its struggles became internationalized and transnational, as much global campaigns of moral disarmament against colonial injustice as local contests of arms. In this expansive history, Martin Thomas tells the story of decolonization and its intrinsic link to globalization. He traces the connections between these two transformative processes: the end of formal empire and the acceleration of global integration, market reorganization, cultural exchange, and migration. The End of Empires and a World Remade shows how profoundly decolonization shaped the process of globalization in the wake of empire collapse. In the second half of the twentieth century, decolonization catalyzed new international coalitions; it triggered partitions and wars; and it reshaped North-South dynamics. Globalization promised the decolonized greater access to essential resources, to wider networks of influence, and to worldwide audiences, but its neoliberal variant has reinforced economic inequalities and imperial forms of political and cultural influences. In surveying these two codependent histories across the world, from Latin America to Asia, Thomas explains why the deck was so heavily stacked against newly independent nations. Decolonization stands alongside the great world wars as the most transformative event of twentieth-century history. In The End of Empires and a World Remade, Thomas offers a masterful analysis of the greatest process of state-making (and empire-unmaking) in modern history.

This book is the first to explore memory, misremembering, forgetting, and anniversaries in the history of psychiatry and mental health. It challenges simplistic representations of the callous nature of mental health care in the past, while at the same time eschewing a celebratory and uncritical marking of anniversaries and individuals. Asking critical questions of the early Whiggish histories of mental health care, the book problematizes the idea of a shared professional and institutional history, and the abiding faith placed in the reform of medicine, administration, and even patients. It contends that much post-1800 legislation drafted to ensure reform, acted to preserve beliefs about the ‘bad old days’ and a ‘brighter future’ in the state memories of imperial powers, which in turn exported these notions around the world. Conversely, the collection demonstrates the variety of remembering and forgetting, building on recent interest in the ideological and cultural linkages between past and present in international psychiatric practice. In this way, it seeks to trace the pathways of memory, exploring the direction of travel, and the perpetuation, remodeling, and uprooting of recollection. Chapter “The New Socialist Citizen and ‘Forgetting’ Authoritarianism: Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Revolution in Socialist Yugoslavia” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer. com.

The description for this book, Origins of Containment: A Psychological Explanation, will be forthcoming.