Bücher der Reihe Mental Health in Historical Perspective

This book explores the improbable rise of medical hypnotism in Victorian Britain and its subsequent assimilation and neglect. It follows the careers of the ¿New Hypnotists¿: Charles Lloyd Tuckey, John Milne Bramwell, George Kingsbury and Robert Felkin. This loosely knit group all trained with the Suggestion School of Nancy and published books on hypnotism. They had to confront the many public and medical prejudices against the trance state which had persisted after the scandalous disgrace of John Elliotson and medical mesmerism, fifty years before. Hypnotism was a highly contested technology and in the 1890s the debates about safety and utility were fought in the national newspapers as well as the medical journals. The new hypnotists took on the might of the medical institutions personified by Ernest Hart, Editor of the British Medical Journal. However their timing was propitious, as the rise of faith-healing forced the medical profession to confront the non-physical therapeutic aspects of the doctor-patient relationship. The hypnotic discourse was shaped by these developments, but also by the fascination of the general public, novelists, occultists, psychic investigators, educationalists and spiritualists in the myriad possibilities of the trance state. Despite growing interest in the prehistory of British psychology and talking therapies, and the recent challenges to the primacy of Freudian histories, there are few accounts of the development of British ¿eclectic therapy¿. This book uses the New Hypnotists as a lens to examine Victorian medicine and society, exploring their role in establishing the term ¿psychotherapy,¿ and legitimising medical hypnotism, a precursor of psychological therapies.

This book represents the first systematic study of the certification of lunacy in the British Empire. Considering a variety of legal, archival, and published sources, it traces the origins and dissemination of a peculiar method for determining mental unsoundness defined as the ¿Victorian system¿. Shaped by the dynamics surrounding the clandestine committal of wealthy Londoners in private madhouses, this system featured three distinctive tenets: standardized forms, independent medical examinations, and written facts of insanity. Despite their complexity, Victorian certificates achieved a remarkable success. Not only did they survive in the UK for more than a century, but they also served as a model for the development of mental health laws around the world. By the start of the Second World War, more than seventy colonial and non-colonial jurisdictions adopted the Victorian formula for making lunacy official with some countries still relying on it to this very day. Using case studies from Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific, this book charts the temporal and geographical trajectory of an imperial technology used to determine a person¿s destiny. Shifting the focus from metropolitan policies to colonial dynamics, and from macro developments to micro histories, it explores the perspectives of families, doctors, and public officials as they began to deal with the delicate business of certification. This book will be of interest to scholars working on mental health policy, the history of medicine, disability studies, and the British Empire.

This book examines the lasting impact of war on individuals and their communities in pre-modern Europe. Research on combat stress in the modern era regularly draws upon the past for inspiration and validation, but to date no single volume has effectively scrutinised the universal nature of combat stress and its associated modern diagnoses. Highlighting the methodological obstacles of using modern medical and psychological models to understand pre-modern experiences, this book challenges existing studies and presents innovative new directions for future research. With cutting-edge contributions from experts in history, classics and medical humanities, the collection has a broad chronological focus, covering periods from Archaic Greece (c. sixth and early fifth century BCE) to the British Civil Wars (seventeenth century CE). Topics range from the methodological, such as the dangers of retrospective diagnosis and the applicability of Moral Injury to the past, to the conventionally historical, examining how combat stress and post-traumatic stress disorder may or may not have manifested in different time periods. With chapters focusing on combatants, women, children and the collective trauma of their communities, this collection will be of great interest to those researching the history of mental health in the pre-modern period.

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.This monograph has partly been funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union¿s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (ERC Starting Grant DECOLMAD 851871).

This book presents new perspectives on the multiplicity of voices in the histories of mental ill-health. In the thirty years since Roy Porter called on historians to lower their gaze so that they might better understand patient-doctor roles in the past, historians have sought to place the voices of previously silent, marginalised and disenfranchised individuals at the heart of their analyses. Today, the development of service-user groups and patient consultations have become an important feature of the debates and planning related to current approaches to prevention, care and treatment. This edited collection of interdisciplinary chapters offers new and innovative perspectives on mental health and illness in the past and covers a breadth of opinions, views, and interpretations from patients, practitioners, policy makers, family members and wider communities. Its chronology runs from the early modern period to the twenty-first century and includes international and transnational analyses from Europe, North America, Asia and Africa, drawing on a range of sources and methodologies including oral histories, material culture, and the built environment.Chapter 4 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

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.

This book explores the understudied history of the so-called 'incurables' in the Victorian period, the people identified as idiots, imbeciles and the weak-minded, as opposed to those thought to have curable conditions.

This open access book maps a crucial but neglected chapter in the history of psychiatry: how was melancholia transformed in the nineteenth century from traditional melancholy madness into a modern biomedical mood disorder, paving the way for the emergence of clinical depression as a psychiatric illness in the twentieth century?

This book provides the first comprehensive study of the history of Hungarian psychiatry between 1850 and 1920, placed in both an Austro-Hungarian and wider European comparative framework.

This book situates the work of the Soviet psychologist and neurologist Alexander Luria (1902-1977) in its historical context and explores the 'romantic' approach to scientific writing developed in his case histories.

This book examines the origins and early development of private mental health-care in England, showing that the current spectacle of commercially-based participation in key elements of service provision is no new phenomenon.

This book traces the role played by music within asylums, the participation of staff and patients in musical activity, and the links drawn between music, health, and wellbeing.

This book presents new perspectives on the multiplicity of voices in the histories of mental ill-health. In the thirty years since Roy Porter called on historians to lower their gaze so that they might better understand patient-doctor roles in the past, historians have sought to place the voices of previously silent, marginalised and disenfranchised individuals at the heart of their analyses. Today, the development of service-user groups and patient consultations have become an important feature of the debates and planning related to current approaches to prevention, care and treatment. This edited collection of interdisciplinary chapters offers new and innovative perspectives on mental health and illness in the past and covers a breadth of opinions, views, and interpretations from patients, practitioners, policy makers, family members and wider communities. Its chronology runs from the early modern period to the twenty-first century and includes international and transnational analyses from Europe, North America, Asia and Africa, drawing on a range of sources and methodologies including oral histories, material culture, and the built environment.Chapter 4 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book tells the story of one of medicine's most (in)famous treatments: the neurosurgical operation commonly known as lobotomy.

This open access book explores the history of asylums and their civilian patients during the First World War, focusing on the effects of wartime austerity and deprivation on the provision of care.

This book is about the psycho-political visions and programmes in early-twentieth century Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The book uses a variety of published and unpublished sources to retrace major debates, protagonists, and networks involved in the redrawing of the boundaries of psychiatry's sphere of authority.

This book examines the policy and practice of the insanity clauses within the immigration controls of New Zealand and the Commonwealth of Australia.

This open access edited collection contributes a new dimension to the study of mental health and psychiatry in the twentieth century. The chapters in this volume consciously attempt to break down institutional walls and consider mental health through the lenses of institutions, policy, nomenclature, art, lived experience, and popular culture.

This book explores the impact that politics had on the management of mental health care at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This open access book is the first comparative study of public, voluntary and private asylums in nineteenth-century Ireland. Examining nine institutions, it explores whether concepts of social class and status and the emergence of a strong middle class informed interactions between gender, religion, identity and insanity.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book explores how the body was investigated in the late nineteenth-century asylum in Britain.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book tells the story of Barbara Robb and her pressure group, Aid for the Elderly in Government Institutions (AEGIS).

Within this context, the book aims at stoking and informing debate and conversation about how to prevent mental illness and improve mental health in the years to come.Chapters 3, 10, and 12 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

The book argues that the colonial lunatic asylum failed to assimilate into Indian society and therefore remained a failed colonial-medical enterprise. Lunatic asylums left a legacy of historical trauma for the indigenous community because of their coercive and custodial character.

The book relates the history of post-war psychiatry, focusing on deinstitutionalisation, namely the shift from asylum to community in the second part of the twentieth century. After the Second World War, psychiatry and mental health care were reshaped by deinstitutionalisation.

This open access edited collection contributes a new dimension to the study of mental health and psychiatry in the twentieth century. The chapters in this volume consciously attempt to break down institutional walls and consider mental health through the lenses of institutions, policy, nomenclature, art, lived experience, and popular culture.