Doing Psychiatry in Postwar Europe

European psychiatry underwent numerous transformations in the second half of the twentieth century. A variety of practices were experienced and routinised, contributing to reshape the boundaries of the mental health field. Case studies from across Europe allow one to appreciate how new 'ways of doing' contributed to transform the field, beyond the watchwords of deinstitutionalisation, the introduction of neuroleptics, centrality of patients and overcoming of asylum-era habits. Through a variety of sources and often adopting a small-scale perspective, the book takes a close look at the way new practices took shape and at how they installed themselves, eventually facing resistance, injecting new purposes, and contributing to enlarging psychiatry's fields of expertise, therefore blurring its once-more-defined boundaries. Studying psychiatry in its making and unmaking in the second half of the twentieth century allows one to see it less as a science grounded in theory or laboratory research than as an art of doing, which can be understood as the outcome of practices.