Research on the history of psychiatry

Availability

At institutions which have purchased the ProQuest databases, abstracts of most of the dissertations can be downloaded, and many entire texts can also be downloaded free of charge.

A printed version of a dissertation can be purchased from ProQuest Company, 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI481 06-1346, USA (tel. 800-5210600). [Current prices (March 2021) for University Affiliated Persons are: soft $65.00, hard $82.00, PDF (when available) $41.00.]

Jonathon Erlen ¹ has provided the following annotated list of dissertations relevant to our field, based on his review of Dissertation Abstracts. ² Entries are in alphabetical order of author; each entry gives title, author, doctorate, year, institution, number of pages (if known) and unique identifier/order number. Note that no accents are used in titles in Dissertation Abstracts.

“The dead which cannot be buried”: War, madness, and modernity in the Levant, 1896-1982.

Abi-Rached, Joelle M., PhD, 2017, Harvard University, MA, 383 pp., 28222951.

Drawing on a wide variety of archival and primary sources, this study reconstructs the history of ʿAṣfūriyyeh, one of the first modern psychiatric hospitals in the Middle East, as a window into the ways in which modern medicine changed common perceptions and understandings of mental illness as well as the wider socio-political role that ʿAṣfūriyyeh played in the region. The rise and fall of ʿAṣfūriyyeh – from its founding in 1896 until its closure in 1982, in a region marked by significant political upheavals – calls for a revisionist interpretation of the role and impact of the birth of psychiatry in the region. The author argues that ʿAṣfūriyyeh was the product of collective actions and influences (both local and global). The Hospital owed its existence, survival, and growth to various factors, including an unabated rivalry between foreign powers and among missionaries, as well as to local aspirations for medical enlightenment and modernity.

“Very many more men than women”: A study of the social implications of diagnostics at the South Carolina State Hospital.

Bertagnolli, Clara Elizabeth, MA, 2015, University of South Carolina, 141 pp., 10008774.

Treatment and understanding of mental illness has vastly changed in the past century and a half, leading many historians and psychiatrists to puzzle over the logic and motivations driving the once-abundant mental institutions known as insane asylums. Though a great deal of literature has emerged in this burgeoning historical field, few have looked at the diagnostics used by psychiatrists of the past to see what they reveal about the former system of mental health. This study uses the South Carolina State Hospital as a case study to demonstrate how diagnostic trends can be used to understand the gender and racial perceptions that physicians at these institutions applied to their work.

A qualitative exploration of the 2016 presidential election’s impact on psychotherapy and mental health professionals.

Bloom, Krystle M., PsvD, 2020, Chicago School of Professional Psychology, 96 pp., 28028142.

The 2016 presidential election and ongoing political climate have been met with an increased prevalence of political discussions within psychotherapy. As the novelty of this phenomenon correlates with a need for empirical research, the current study represents an attempt to understand the influence of sociopolitical distress on mental health professionals and the therapeutic experience. A qualitative research design was imposed in the form of an interpretive phenomenological analysis. Five higher order themes resulted from this analysis, including Negative Response to the Election, Uncertainty, Clinical Challenges Within Sessions, Variations in Conceptualization and Treatment, and Need for Increased Support.

Lone Star insanity: Efforts to treat the mentally ill in Texas, 1861-1929.

Boyd, Dalton T., MA, 2015, University of North Texas, 293 pp., 10075990.

During the mid-nineteenth century, the citizens of Texas were forced to keep their mentally disturbed family members at home, which caused stress on the caregivers and the further debilitation of the afflicted. To remedy this situation, mental health experts and Texas politicians began to create a system of healing known as state asylums. The purpose of this study is to determine how Texas mental health care came into being, the research and theories behind the prevention and treatment programs that asylum physicians employed to overcome mental illness, in addition to the victories and shortcomings of the system. Through this work, it will be shown that during the 1850s until the 1920s institutions faced difficulty in achieving success from many adverse conditions including, but not limited to, overcrowding, large geographical conditions, poor health practices, faulty construction, insufficient funding, ineffective prevention and treatment methods, disorganization, cases of patient abuse, incompetent employees, prejudice, and legal improprieties. As a result, by 1930, these asylums were merely places to detain the mentally ill in order to rid them from society. This study shows that lack of full support from Texas legislators, deriving from the idea that this system was not one of their top priorities among the state’s concerns, led to the inability of the Texas mental health care system to properly assist their patients.

‘A mother specific disorder for a mother specific crime’: Alienists, infanticide and puerperal insanity in nineteenth-century Britain.

Burgess, Laura Ann, MA, 2020, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 121 pp., 27993279.

From the early nineteenth century, the British medical community worked to redefine and reassert their professional space within society. During this process, medical men developed specific areas of focus and began to develop these into specialized subfields of medical knowledge. The author tracks how alienists – the self-ascribed term for early psychiatrists – established themselves as a recognized medical field by the end of the nineteenth century. Using markers of specialization developed by historians George Rosen and George Weisz, this study analyzes how alienists asserted their specialized authority in two professional areas: the medical field and the legal system. This study focuses on the development of puerperal insanity as a mental disorder and its connection to infanticide, in order to outline how alienists met these markers of specialization by the close of the nineteenth century. Focusing on puerperal insanity, this study analyzes this disease’s development by alienists and how it assisted them in defining their specialized role in the twentieth-century medical and legal communities.

Seeing sickness 看病: Mental illness in contemporary Chinese art.

Click, Carolyn Louise, MA, 2020, University of Colorado at Boulder, 131 pp., 27961574.

Mental illness and narratives of cultural ‘sickness’ have often been a theme in Chinese history. Not long ago, Lu Xun’s madman reminded us that metaphors of cultural illness do not stop at the bio-physical level, but often entail psychological pathologies. Today, artist Guo Haiping is also concerned with themes of psychological distress in Chinese culture. The author examines three of Guo’s art projects and how they engage with psychological narratives of both sickness and health through contemporary Chinese art. Artists like Guo Haiping can be seen as ‘visibility workers’ who use contemporary art not only as a means to promote social acceptance, but as a means to bring the visibility of validation to the existence of mental illness.

Psychology of the 12th century Renaissance in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival.

Nakajima, Tatsuhiro, MA, 2015, Pacifica Graduate Institute, CA, 63 pp., 1692065.

Is theoretical construction of Carl Jung’s psychology an extension of Aristotle’s natural philosophy and Hermeticism? Aristotle’s natural philosophy was transferred to 12th-century Europe, via Islam, with Hermeticism and Neoplatonism. Transmission of Corpus Hermeticum to Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival was an example. It is possible to identify the psychology of Aristotle in these texts. Aristotle’s natural philosophy was displaced by the philosophy of mind after Descartes, and Jung analyzed this paradigm shift as the depsychologization of projected psychology. By applying the methodology of the continuity thesis of the history of science, Jung’s psychology is elucidated as a renewal of natural philosophy through transformation. Jung transformed Aristotle’s epistemological distinction between reason (logos) and intellect (nous) into the differentiation of the ego and the self.

Multidisciplinary care in psychiatry: History, challenge and analysis for improvement.

Park, Sophia Seonyeong, MA, 2020, Temple University, PA, 38 pp., 27835659.

Psychiatric illnesses take place in the context of socioeconomic circumstances. A growing body of evidence supports the fact that a multidisciplinary care system, which includes not only medical management but also social and psychological care, significantly improves short-term and long-term outcomes of diseases. However, at present, multidisciplinary teams often function without an exact manual and rely on traditions and previous customs that vary among centers, and this can make individual care professionals feel uncertain and ambiguous in terms of his or her roles. This can pose a serious a risk of professional frustration and sense of disempowerment, which can negatively impact team dynamic and quality of patient care. This study attempts to articulate possible challenges that can be faced by a multidisciplinary team, and how such challenges can be handled. These challenges will be examined, using a historical example of National Institute of Mental Health (1946) and a personal account from a British social worker. Possible solutions for the current problems are discussed, including implementing effective communication systems and adapting a multidisciplinary care plan to address the special needs of different age groups. It is emphasized that multidisciplinary care is both a medical and ethical imperative; not only sociobehavioral interventions will improve patient adherence, prevent relapse, and maximize the effect of the care, but also the model will facilitate patient’s recovery of agency, the ability to discern right from wrong, and autonomy, the right to make the decision that is most consistent with their beliefs and value systems.

Religion and madness: Contests over faith and insanity in the American cultural imaginary, 1840-1920.

Prince, Alexandra, PhD, 2020, State University of New York at Buffalo, 326 pp., 27997186.

This study is a cultural history of the co-identification of religion and insanity over the long nineteenth century. It examines how the medical and popular label of insanity or ‘religious insanity’ was deployed to impugn, subvert and arrange diverse new American religious identities for imprisonment and institutionalization. Furthermore, it analyzes how the insanity label functioned to forward and undergird a constellation of gendered and racial presumptions. The project moves chronologically from considerations of early nineteenth-century white evangelical revivalism, Second Adventism (Millerism) and Spiritualism to later nineteenth-century examinations, including post-Emancipation African-American millenarian movements, Pentecostalism and Christian Science.

Memories of asylums: A narrative examination of postwar state hospital experiences.

Tamao, Shuko, PhD, 2020, State University of New York at Buffalo, 228 pp., 27995113.

This study examines the memories of former asylum residents who were committed to American state-run psychiatric hospitals as patients between the 1940s and 1970s, the period characterized by the deinstitutionalization of asylum residents in the United States. The author introduces and examines two different modes of memories: collective and personal. The former asylum residents and patient liberation activists – who identify as consumers/survivors/ex-patients of psychiatry – used these two kinds of memory, either as a platform to advance their political agendas or to navigate their lives in the community as former asylum residents. This work demonstrates how these individuals interacted with these two different modes of memory and explain how they shaped the history of state hospitals during that period. Former asylum residents are depicted as vibrant and essential, albeit not always equally empowered, political actors in the process of deinstitutionalization.

The history and legacy of the “Orillia Asylum for Idiots:” Children’s experiences of institutional violence.

Viscardis, Katharine Maye, PhD, 2020, Trent University (Ontario, Canada), 543 pp., 28149658.

The ‘Orillia Asylum for Idiots’ (1861–2009), Canada’s oldest and largest facility for the care and protection of children and adults with disabilities, was once praised as a beacon of humanitarian progress and described as a ‘community within a community’. Yet survivors who lived in the facility during the period after World War II – a time described as the ‘golden age of children’s rights’ – tell harrowing stories of abuse and neglect. Despite the nation’s promise to ‘put children first’ and protect the universal rights of ‘Canada’s children’, children incarcerated in the Orillia Asylum were subjected to systemic neglect and cultural discrimination, daily humiliation and dehumanization, and physical, sexual and emotional abuse. This study considers how such violence against children could occur for so long in a facility maintained by a state which invested in protecting children. It finds that children who were admitted to the Orillia Asylum were not considered to be ‘Canada’s children’ at all by virtue of being labelled as ‘mentally deficient’, ‘feeble-minded’, ‘not-quite-human’ and ‘not-quite-children.’