From 1871 to 1875, a series of annual meetings termed medical was held at the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, organised by the Medical Superintendent, James Crichton-Browne. This article examines the setting, content, reception, and purposes of these meetings, using reportage from the local popular press to supplement the relatively limited accounts published in contemporary medical journals. The evidence indicates that the provided educational opportunity for invited local practitioners by showcasing the clinical and experimental research work of the Asylum. Hence these meetings showed some resemblance to modern medical meetings devoted to diseases of the brain. However, in addition they provided spectacle and entertainment, akin to the theatrical productions also hosted at the Asylum.

traces Prichard's contributions to the development of psychiatric theory and the psychiatric profession. It also explores his broader range of scientific interests clearly set in cultural and personal context. Armed with his Edinburgh MD, he published innovative anthropological textbooks demonstrating the unity and single origin of the human species. As physician to Bristol's workhouse/lunatic asylum, he studied his captive patients' neurological and psychiatric conditions, avidly collected case histories, gathered medical statistics widely and mined Continental psychiatric literature to publish influential works on neurology and psychological medicine, notably formulating the condition called moral insanity. Appointed to the Lunacy Commission, he published a manual of psychiatric jurisprudence and participated in the development of asylumdom.

The second half of the 20th century saw significant progress toward the destigmatization of psychiatric illness and the embrace of mental health care by the American public. Attitudes toward political leaders and candidates with psychiatric diagnoses also evolved during this period-although not at the same pace. From the 1940s through the early 1970s, such diagnoses damaged the careers of prominent officials including Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and Democratic vice-presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton. By the 1980s and 1990s, candidates like Tom Turnipseed and Lawton Chiles increasingly embraced candor with regard to their psychiatric diagnoses and histories, and voters often proved forgiving. A transitional event in this development was the now largely forgotten hospitalization of Gerald Ford's Secretary of the Interior, Stanley K. Hathaway, for depression in 1975. This paper examines the Hathaway case and argues that Ford's willingness to stand by Hathaway proved a turning point in the embrace of politicians with psychiatric illnesses by the American electorate.

This study revisits Eugène Minkowski's concept of schizophrenic melancholia, emphasizing its relevance to contemporary psychiatry. Through a phenomenological lens, Minkowski highlighted how depressive symptoms in schizophrenia are not merely secondary but intrinsic to the disorder, deeply intertwined with disruptions in time, space, and self-experience. By examining clinical cases, theoretical analyses, and existing literature, this research explores Minkowski's idea of the "loss of vital contact with reality" as a framework for understanding the existential dimensions of schizophrenia. His insights bridge psychopathology and philosophy, offering valuable perspectives for integrating subjective patient experiences into modern psychiatric approaches. Minkowski's legacy underscores the need for holistic, patient-centered care that addresses both clinical symptoms and the underlying existential disruptions.

Richard Rows may be an unfamiliar name to historians of psychiatry today, other than for his role as superintendent of the Red Cross Military Hospital at Maghull, near Liverpool, during the First World War. Accordingly, this paper attempts a conspectus of Rows' career in order to contextualise the psychotherapeutic approach he developed, not only to "shell-shock" patients during the War but also to "functional mental illnesses" encountered in subsequent civilian practice. This examination shows that although Rows adopted some Freudian or quasi-Freudian psychological vocabulary and techniques, as did many of his contemporaries, he also had a long-standing commitment to a physiological conceptualisation of brain disorders. For Rows, this was not incompatible with, but complementary to, his psychodynamic approach in clinical encounters. His work extended beyond the limits of psychiatry to adopt perspectives originating with contemporary neurologists and experimental neurophysiologists.

In 1777 a strange, distracted young woman took up residence under a haystack in a village outside Bristol, attracting much local attention. 'Louisa' gained wider celebrity after the writer Hannah More publicised her plight in the national press. She subsequently spent several years in a private madhouse and then the lunatic ward of Guy's Hospital, where she died in 1800. It was generally presumed that Louisa was of noble foreign birth and possibly the hapless victim of family intrigue or even sexual exploitation, her mysterious story being interpreted as a contemporary morality tale. In actuality, recorded circumstances demonstrated quite sympathetic communal responses toward victims of insanity, as well as different options for providing care and treatment in 18th-century England.

In the 1970s, activist attorneys took on what they saw as a major issue in American society - the authority of psychiatrists to lock up hundreds of thousands of people against their will in state psychiatric hospitals in violation of their civil liberties. After a series of legal challenges to psychiatric power, states constructed mental health codes to limit involuntary psychiatric hospital admissions to a much smaller population of individuals at imminent risk to harm themselves or others. Decades later, issues of psychiatric authority with regard to social dilemmas arose again, but this time with the expectation that psychiatric expertise could help solve the contemporary problem of gun violence. This paper examines the history of the intersection between psychiatry and social problems, especially dangerousness, and the fears and expectations that have accompanied impressions of psychiatric expertise and authority.

Since the 2000s, the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has increased, and the diagnosis of ASD has become heterogeneous. Recently, some researchers have begun to regard ASD as a form of neurodiversity rather than a medical disorder. In this article, we re-examine the establishment process of early infantile autism, as reported by Leo Kanner, and place the current debate in a historical context. An essential issue for Kanner was differentiating early infantile autism from childhood schizophrenia, but what made this difficult was the changing concept of schizophrenia over time. We consider how this affected Kanner's arguments and how it relates to the current autism debate.

This article explores the role of Brazilian art therapy in the 20th century in facilitating linguistic encounters through non-linguistic media for psychotic patients, influenced by the vanguardist movements of the time and framed by Jaspers' theory of language. Osório Cesar's interpretations of patients' artwork, Nise da Silveira's focus on artistic expression, and Lula Wanderley's use of Relational Objects exemplify the potential of non-linguistic media to bridge the communication gap in therapy. These approaches highlight the importance of symbolic content and bodily experiences in conveying meaning. Art therapy, shaped by its relationship with vanguardist movements, harnesses non-linguistic media to create linguistic encounters, allowing psychotic patients to communicate their distress and reshape their reality. This holistic approach enhances mental and emotional well-being by integrating artistic and bodily experiences into therapeutic practices, fostering meaningful transformation.

Alterations of language are a classical hallmark of schizophrenia that many psychologists studied as an expression of psychotic thought disorder. Studies addressing the linguistic specificities of schizophrenic language are less frequent, and those focusing on the semantic sphere are very rare. This paper examines Sergio Piro's studies on schizophrenic language. His theory of semantic dissociation offers a solution to old disputes (e.g. excessive concretism vs abstractness of schizophrenic language). Piro suggests a fluctuating semantic halo that can be enlarged and/or restricted, depending on the linguistic situation. The process of semantic dissociation includes four possible disorders, representing a gradual disorganization of speech: the fluctuation of the semantic halo, the semantic distortion, the semantic dispersion, and the semantic dissolution. Finally, by approaching the topic through semantic analysis, he restored anthropological meaning to linguistic features previously conceived as mere symptoms of a degenerative process.

This article examines the historical narratives of one of the key psychologists who helped to develop and carry out the Enhanced Interrogation programme. The Enhanced Interrogation programme ran from the early to the mid-2000s. It used aggression to facilitate the acquisition of information from suspected terrorists. The programme was unique in its use of mental health professionals to design, implement and monitor its activities. The psychologist's historical accounts were thematically analysed. The article argues that death anxiety and death guilt may drive some health professionals to support Enhanced Interrogation type activities. It also argues that health professionals may be unable to control deviance and violations in situations where Enhanced Interrogation activities are occurring.

Jon Stock's focuses on mid-century psychiatrist William Sargant, his 'deep sleep therapy', and other physical treatments such as ECT and insulin coma therapy. It exemplifies 'narrative determinism'-the tendency of familiar storytelling tropes to shape historical interpretation. Stock's emotionally charged, selectively sourced account contrasts with the complex clinical realities and ethical standards of the time. Such one-sided narratives distort public understanding, undermine trust in mental health services, and oversimplify psychiatric practice. A more balanced account, attentive to context and therapeutic intent, is needed to understand figures like Sargant and the evolution of psychiatric care. 'Narrative determinism', in keeping with the ideas of Hayden White, offers a way of characterising some forces shaping unhelpful historical accounts.

This study delves into the historical documentation from 1900 to 1936 by Spanish doctors and educators concerning children's hyperactivity. By focusing on medical perspectives of the time, we aim to explore the conceptualisation of childhood phenomenology within the context of significant international literature of that era. The publications of doctors Jerónimo Moragas and Gonzalo Rodríguez Lafora, along with educators Augusto Vidal Perera and José Sarmiento Lausén, will be examined to understand the medical and educational approaches to childhood restlessness. Additionally, the study will review diverse perspectives on this disorder. The research also highlights a noticeable gap in the assistance provided to these children. Ultimately, the article provides insights into how society and childcare professionals addressed the phenomenon of childhood hyperactivity.

Mortality is closely linked to age, sex, and social and historical context. Standardised Mortality Rates (SMR) address these contextual factors by comparing mortality in a population under study with that in people of the same age and sex, the same period in history and from a similar cultural context. We use records from the Hatton Asylum and contemporaneous census data in order to calculate SMR in the asylum population, showing rates that were about 2.5 times greater than the population at the time. This is much lower than crude mortality rates, which we calculated as being more than seven times greater than in the population. The SMR method may enable a more meaningful understanding of mortality in asylums or other institutions.

French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, a towering figure familiar to late-19th-century physicians, became better known to the laity of different countries through periodicals, books, and plays. This article examines how Charcot influenced the works of four popular Scandinavian authors: Norwegians Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Hans Ernst Kinck, and Øvre Richter Frich, and a Swede, Axel Munthe. These popular novelists and playwrights, all having lived in Paris, provided pictures of different sides of the brilliant and innovative Parisian physician and researcher, who despite his renown was nonetheless criticized for his theories about the hysterias and hypnosis.

In the first half of the 1950s, psychoanalysts and neurosurgeons used electrical brain stimulation to explore hard-to-reach, unconscious psychological processes such as repressed memories, defence mechanisms and sexual identity. The development of evolutionary theory and neurophysiological methods and theory, together with the birth of psychoanalysis, were important precursors to these remarkable stimulation experiments. Experimental, theoretical and clinical antecedents of these stimulation experiments between the 1870s and the 1940s are discussed to show how smoothly the apparently opposing perspectives of psychoanalysis and neurophysiology merged. Two case studies are then briefly described. It is concluded that this striking and brief collaboration demonstrated a pragmatic and eclectic approach that integrated different theories and methods for a more holistic understanding and treatment of psychiatric disorders.

This article brings together contemporary works by Frantz Fanon and Catalan exile psychiatrist Josep Solanes to consider the simultaneous emergence at the end of the Second World War of discourses articulating the plight of refugees and racialized people through the medium of psychiatric discourses focusing on socially inflicted mental pathologies of exile and displacement. Emphasizing in particular their respective phenomenological approaches, it is argued that their trajectories can be attached to the same genealogy of radical psychiatry emerging in the Global North and then continuing into the Global South (Africa in the case of Fanon, Latin America in that of Solanes) where they were developed and made their impact.

The French educator Allan Kardec (1804-1869) was one of the first researchers to propose the scientific investigation of psychical experiences and was an influential scholar in Europe during the second half of the 19th Century. However, his life and the outcome of his research in this field are currently little known and often misconstrued. This paper briefly presents Kardec's biography and his first steps in the investigation of psychical phenomena, especially mediumship. Kardec raised and tested several hypotheses on the causes of mediumistic phenomena: fraud; hallucinations; a new physical force; somnambulism (including unconscious cerebration); thought reflection (including telepathy and super-psi); and discarnate minds.

Crimes against humanity took place in many institutions as well as psychiatric departments during the Nazi dictatorship. The cruel and inhumane history of psychiatry during National Socialism is already widely known and broadly published. Victims of the Nazi regime, of the Holocaust, of racism, racial hygiene, and hereditary biology have often been the subjects of scientific inquiry; the relatives and descendants of the killed inpatients have yet to be part of a scientific or psychotherapeutic response. Analogous to the psychiatric-psychotherapeutic approach with traumatized individuals, the procedure "secure-describe and work through-reconnect" was used in collective remembrance work and commemorative culture. As an example of one part of this collective memorial process, the grief work undertaken with the relatives of the victims of Nazi crime is presented. A phenomenological description presents the results of contact with 55 relatives and offspring of victims of Nazi crimes in psychiatric or associated institutions during National Socialism.

This classic text by the German psychiatrist Karl Wilmanns stands out as exceptional in the literature describing the psychopathology of mentally ill homeless people. Wilmanns' psychopathological descriptions are excellent, as are his observations of the disheartening failure to recognize dementia praecox in courts, prisons and workhouses, and the significant consequences of this failure for the patients. As he vividly shows, most patients manifested a wide range of severe psychiatric symptoms and signs that should have caught the attention of the courts, prison doctors, and even persons with no psychiatric knowledge. Wilmanns considers the main reason for this failure to be inadequate knowledge of psychopathology. Although dementia praecox (schizophrenia) is no longer a new concept, as it was at Wilmanns' time, we still see people with severe psychiatric symptoms roaming the streets and failing to benefit from timely recognition and treatment of their mental disorder.

This paper provides an overview of psychedelic research at the Mayo Clinic in the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on methods, objectives, findings, and ethical practices. We highlight instances where researchers prioritized scientific progress over the autonomy, safety, and equitable treatment of research subjects, and discuss this history in the context of ongoing challenges with informed consent and equity in contemporary psychedelic research.

Maurycy Urstein was one of the few Polish physicians of the interwar period to enter into a dialogue with leading psychiatrists of his era. Among the richness of his scientific activity, two threads deserve particular attention: his studies on catatonia, thanks to which he gained the prestige of a scientist-clinician; as well as his forensic and psychological studies, which granted him media fame or, in modern terms, the status of a celebrity. Urstein published key works on psychiatry in German, and Polish translations appeared later. In the case of the monograph devoted to Eligiusz Niewiadomski, the language of the publication was Polish, which meant that it was basically not present in global scientific circulation.

As a deeply hybrid discipline, psychiatry demands research that tackles the concepts constituting it and its objects. This is an essential prerequisite to empirical studies, the validity of which are directly dependent on a clear understanding of the underlying concepts. Empathy and sympathy are concepts used variably and inconsistently in clinical practice and research, with ensuing uncertainties around their role and meaning. Using a historical epistemology approach, this paper compares these concepts by examining the structures, intersections, stabilities and factors that shape them. It shows that neither concept is invariant, and, despite overlap, the concepts are essentially different, underpinned by different assumptions, holding different functions and capturing different phenomena. In turn, such differences require apposite approaches to their empirical study.

This article explores the evolution of mental hygiene and the stigmatization of mental illness in Latin America during the 20th century. It examines how psychiatric reforms and the mental hygiene movement influenced the social perception of mental illness, highlighting the spread of psychological categories and the construction of stigmatizing language. Using the publications of mental hygiene groups and case analyses in various countries, it reveals how these practices contributed to marginalization and social control, shaping contemporary mental health policies.

In the mid-nineteenth century, magnetic theories penetrated other recognized medical practices in Argentina in order to rationalize their procedures, in a culture that accepted and validated magnetism as a positive science. At the start of the twentieth century, mesmerists created a society, published books and journals, and carried out a large welfare programme; there were public lectures, and magnetic treatment for spiritualists and the general public, emphasizing the therapeutic properties of mesmerism. Magnetologists/mesmerists measured vital radiation and built devices using sensitive objects as 'physical' evidence of it. There was an interest in acquiring and using artefacts to measure human radiation useful in medicine. Magnetic practices survived until the end of the 1920s, when they lost importance.

In 1762, Louis-Antoine Marquis de Caraccioli (1719-1803), a prolific writer of the eighteenth century, dedicated a book to a psychological theme that medicine has forgotten: '' in French, which we will translate as 'cheerfulness'. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, this work inspired two doctoral theses in medicine, one defended in Montpellier, the other in Paris. In their texts, Louis Monferran (1785-?) and Vincent Rémi Giganon (1794-1857) explored the therapeutic benefits of the medical prescription of cheerfulness. In addition to lifestyle recommendations, they focused on the psychotropic substances available to them: alcohol, coca, hemp and opiates. In an original and novel way, Giganon introduced and recommended '', or inhaled nitrous oxide gas.

We report on the play entitled (The daily bread) by Marcel Réja (1873-1957), a French alienist and historian of art in asylums. He also wrote short plays, although he is less well known as a playwright. The plays were printed just in time for the performance, which often took place on the day of the asylum fair. Here, we discuss a one-act play consisting of four scenes in which the actors are his patients.

is ubiquitous in ancient medicine and philosophy. Galen mentions the disease innumerable times, Patristic authors take it as a favourite allegory of human flaws, and no ancient doctor fails to diagnose it and attempt its cure. Yet the nature of this once famous disease has not been properly understood by scholars. My book provides the first full history of . In doing so, it surveys ancient ideas about the interactions between body and soul, both in health and in disease. It also addresses ancient ideas about bodily health, mental soundness and moral 'goodness', and their heritage in contemporary psychiatry, offering a chance to reflect critically on contemporary ideas about what it means to be 'insane'.

This article investigates the diversity of social and political assertions in the work of Vladimir M Bekhterev. Its findings reveal that he drew social and political conclusions based on his doctrine of reflexology. Moreover, he propagated the use of statistical investigations by scientific and governmental institutions to estimate the social and healthcare needs of the population. These conclusions accord with Bekhterev's desire for a transformation of society that would bring continued progress to people's social and living conditions. Additionally, the findings of this research work also support the idea that Bekhterev should be regarded as an important protagonist of neuroethics, a relatively recent field of research.

The Straits Settlements, a collective colony under the administration of British Malaya, was a very unhealthy area in the early years of the nineteenth century. One of the most common sicknesses was mental illness, which could not be cured by medicines. The number of women suffering from mental illness was higher than in men, and it was found that there were many internal and external causes. The increasing number of women patients affected the role of mental hospitals, which were not only for treatment purposes, but also for business. This study will discuss the factors causing women to suffer from mental illness, and the role of the asylum for women mental patients in the nineteenth century.