Books in the Mental Health in Historical Perspective series

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 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 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 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 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).

This book is open access under a CC BY license and explores the under-researched history of male mental illness from the mid-twentieth century. It argues that statistics suggesting women have been more vulnerable to depression and anxiety are misleading since they underplay a host of alternative presentations of 'distress' more common in men.

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.

The relationship between migration and mental health is controversial, contested, and pertinent. In a highly mobile world, where voluntary and enforced movements of population are increasing and likely to continue to grow, that relationship needs to be better understood, yet the terminology is often vague and the issues are wide-ranging.

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 is the first book to address the history of psychiatry under Communism in Central and Eastern Europe, from the Soviet Union to East Germany. It brings together new research addressing understandings of mental health and disorder, treatments and therapies, and the interplay between politics, ideology and psychiatry.

The relationship between migration and mental health is controversial, contested, and pertinent. In a highly mobile world, where voluntary and enforced movements of population are increasing and likely to continue to grow, that relationship needs to be better understood, yet the terminology is often vague and the issues are wide-ranging.