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A shocking story of medical brutality perfomed in the name of psychiatric medicine.
Originally published: London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2015.
The story of hysteria is a curious one, for it persists as an illness for centuries before disappearing. Andrew Scull gives a fascinating account of this socially constructed disease that came to be strongly associated with women, showing the shifts in social, cultural, and medical perceptions through history.
"Psychiatry and Its Discontents provides a wide-ranging and critical perspective on the psychiatric enterprise. The book's historical sweep is broad, ranging from the age of the asylum to the rise of psychopharmacology and the dubious triumphs of "community care." Freud and Foucault, Christian Science and Scientology, psychosurgery and modern drug treatments, trauma and the effects of war on the human psyche, the siren song of neuroscience, and the predicaments confronting the profession at the dawn of the new millennium are but some of the issues considered here. Collectively, the essays that make up Psychiatry and Its Discontents provide a vivid and compelling portrait of the recurring crises of legitimacy that mad-doctors (as they were once called) have endured, and of the impact of psychiatry's ideas and interventions on the lives of those afflicted with mental illness" --
The Victorian Age saw the transformation of the madhouse into the asylum into the mental hospital; of the mad-doctor into the alienist into the psychiatrist; and of the madman (and madwoman) into the mental patient. In Andrew Scull's edited collection Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen, contributors' essays offer a historical analysis of the issues that continue to plague the psychiatric profession today. Topics covered include the debate over the effectiveness of institutional or community treatment, the boundary between insanity and criminal responsibility, the implementation of commitment laws, and the differences in defining and treating mental illness based on the gender of the patient.
Andrew Scull studies the evolution of the treatment of lunacy in England, tracing transformations in social practices & beliefs, the development of institutional management of the mad, & exposing the contrasts between the expectations of asylum founders & the harsh realities of institutional life. Originally published: 1993.
"Andrew Scull examines the social, historical, and culturally variable response to madness over the centuries, providing a provocative and entertaining examination of mental illness over more than two millennia"--Front cover flap.
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Social Order/Mental Disorder represents a provocative and exciting exploration of social response to madness in England and the United States from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Scull, who is well-known for his previous work in this area, examines a range of issues, including the changing social meanings of madness, the emergence and consolidation of the psychiatric profession, the often troubled relationship between psychiatry and the law, the linkages between sex and madness, and the constitution, character, and collapse of the asylum as our standard response to the problems posed by mental disorder. This book is emphatically not part of the venerable tradition of hagiogra...
"Decarceration" is a word which has not yet entered the dictionary. But it is increasingly being used to designate a process with momentous implications for all of us. It is shorthand for a state-sponsored policy of closing down asylums, prisons, and reformatories. Mad people, criminals, and delinquents are being discharged or refused admission to the dumps in which they have been traditionally housed. Instead, they are to be left at large, to be coped with "in the community." We are told by those who run programs of this sort that keeping the criminal and the mentally disturbed in our midst is "humane." We are informed that it is a "more effective" means of curing or rehabilitating such peo...