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This paper examines the psychiatric work villages in Israel, which have so far had little historiographic attention. In the 1950s and 1960s, four work villages were established for people with psychiatric disabilities. They were intended to create a long-term rehabilitative alternative to the common hospitalization practice. These villages were organized around employment in various branches of farming and also offered recreational and cultural activities to alleviate the patients' loneliness and to create a community life. The villages echoed central values of the new country: labour, manufacturing, cooperativity, and cultural and community life. I will discuss the similarities between the psychiatric work villages and earlier, mostly Western, psychiatric therapeutic models, such as moral treatment and the therapeutic community model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During World War I, civilians became a target of the war machine. Air raids transformed the lives of those not involved in active combat and blurred the lines between the home front and the war front. This paper argues that the experience of air raids in World War I was comparable to the combat stress at the Western Front. The author bases her argument on contemporary publications in medical journals, measures taken by British authorities to prevent air-raid shock, and contemporary case records. The narratives of air-raid shock – similarly to those of shell-shocked soldiers – reflect the feelings of terror and loss of control, and demonstrate the profound effect these experiences could have on individuals' mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decades, there has been an increasing scholarly interest in understanding the development of psychiatry and mental health in non-Western worlds in the modern period. Several collective efforts have been made on the East Asian part, and this special issue has selected the examples of the countries of China, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Articles have utilized social and political constructions of psychiatric discourse, as well as the use of case files to research patients' experiences in mental hospitals. Through these historiographies, connections and meanings of East Asian psychiatry are discussed in both global and local contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until around 1979, ‘confused’ or mentally unwell people over 65 years of age tended to be labelled as having ‘senile dementia’. Senile dementia was usually regarded as a single, inevitably hopeless condition, despite gradually accumulating clinical and pathological evidence to the contrary. Specific psychiatric services for mental illness in older people began to emerge in the 1950s, but by 1969 there were fewer than 10 dedicated services nationally. During the 1970s, ‘old age psychiatrists’ established local services and campaigned nationally for them. By 1979, about 100 old age psychiatrists were leading multi-disciplinary teams in half the health districts in England. This paper explores the tortuous development of these new services, focusing on provision for people with dementia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper explores psychiatry’s responses to the twentieth-century socio-political currents in Latvia by focusing on social objectives, clinical ideologies, and institutional contexts of Soviet mental health care. The tradition of German biological psychiatry in which Baltic psychiatrists had been trained blended well with the materialistic monism of Soviet psychoneurology. Pavlov’s teaching of the second signal system was well suited to Soviet ideological needs: speech stimuli were seen as a vehicle for moulding the individual’s mind. The transformation in diagnostic practices during the 1970s and 1980s reflected the demise of optimism about the capacity of the self to model itself to the needs of the society. Latvian psychiatry was prepared to embrace more individualistic and pessimistic theories of the self. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the impact of the works of Emil Kraepelin on modern psychiatric theory and practice. Kraepelin is known for his ideas on the nature and classification of psychiatric disorders as medical discipline, as well as his research in pursuit of this field. He reinforced the primacy of clinical method as the firma terra of psychiatry that seeks and builds alliances with the auxiliary sciences of psychology.

In the late 1930s, when colonial psychiatry was well established in the Maghreb, the diagnosis 'psychosis of civilization' appeared in some psychiatrists' writings. Through the clinical case of a Libyan woman treated by the Italian psychiatrist Angelo Bravi in Tripoli, this article explores its emergence and its specificity in a differential approach, and highlights its main characteristics. The term applied to subjects poised between two worlds: incapable of becoming 'like' Europeans – a goal to which they seem to aspire – but too far from their 'ancestral habits' to revert for a quiet life. The visits of these subjects to colonial psychiatric institutions, provided valuable new material for psychiatrists: to see how colonization impacted inner life and to raise awareness of the long-term socio-political dangers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a brief history and the evolution of mental health policy in Turkey. It aims to analyse how mental health policies were transformed and why certain policies were introduced at specific times. The modern history of mental health policy is divided into three periods: the institutionalization of psychiatry and hospital-based mental health services; the introduction of community-based mental healthcare services; and lastly, the policy of deinstitutionalization after the 1980s. These periods have been categorized in a way that basically coincides with Turkey's modern political history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an analysis of the discourses, the ideological appropriation and the practical influence of mental hygiene in Spanish psychiatry during the early years of the Francoist regime, this article examines its decline and subsequent replacement by the new concept of mental health promoted by the World Health Organization and other international bodies from the mid-twentieth century. The old approach, essentially focused on the prophylaxis of insanity within the framework of a set of interventionist policies of social defence, was thus transformed from the beginning of the 1960s into a much more ambitious and comprehensive project which sought to promote the psychosocial balance and performance of individuals in the context of increasingly socialized health-related discourses and networks of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1863 the Colonial Office reviewed colonial hospitals and lunatic asylums in those parts of the British Empire it administered – probably the first and widest international comparative study up to that date. This article outlines the background, process and scope of the review of asylums, and considers its significance. The resulting ‘digest’ is an important source to explain how, why, when and by whom metropolitan ideas acquired official endorsement and spread throughout the British world. Using the review’s general findings and suggestions, a tool is provided for comparing inter-colonial achievements. With New Zealand as a case study, the article concludes that, relative to other influences, the digest played a limited and largely indirect part in shaping New Zealand’s mental health policy before 1876. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contemporary accounts credit Dr Francis Willis (1718–1807) with facilitating the recovery of King George III from his major episode of acute mania in 1788–9. Subsequently Willis was summoned to Lisbon to advise on the mental health problems of Queen Maria I. This article reports the nature of the illnesses of Maria and her two similarly affected sisters, and uses the program OPCRIT to propose diagnoses of major depressive disorders. The high prevalence of consanguinity and insanity among the Portuguese monarchy and their antecedents probably contributed to their mental health problems. The successive contributions of the Willis family from Thomas Willis (1621–75) to his grand-nephew, Francis Willis (1792–1859), are reviewed; the popular image is somewhat inaccurate and does not highlight their part in the development of psychiatry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Penned at the height of the debate on national regeneration in Germany after World War I, Emil Kraepelin’s study On Uprootedness sets out his views on social psychiatry. More than just a response to critics of his nosology, On Uprootedness outlines a larger political agenda of social governance and ‘inner colonization’. This introduction places Kraepelin’s understanding of social psychiatry in the broader context of social reform debates in the early Weimar Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the quantitative analysis of the concepts of order and normality underlying the psychiatric practice of two mental health institutions between 1870 and 1970 in Zurich, Switzerland. The analysis is based on a representative random sample of 1330 records of patients from two institutions in the Canton of Zurich. The analysis encompasses the types of psychiatric measures for various cases and the explanation of the fundamental reasons and principles behind them.

The article examines a programme for U.S. psychiatry, wherein the profession would dedicate itself to the reconstitution of mentally-fit and socially-productive citizens, developed by William Alanson White at Saint Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. It is noted that racist assumptions that lies within the programme led physicians to expect little more than common labour from their black patients, that prevented them from comprehending the impact of substandard and racially-segregated care.

The article presents a study which focuses on the practices and institutionalization psychiatric disciplines in Denmark from 1850 to 1920. The study focuses on the practices of explaining mental disorders and to demonstrate the significant role of these practices in establishing psychiatry as a special branch of medicine. It also focuses the struggle of Danish psychiatrists to be accepted as practitioners of science by conforming with the common scientific standards.

The article discusses the works of Julius Ludwig August Koch and his importance to the history of psychiatry. It states that his book "Psychopathic Inferiorities," which became one of his fundamental texts on personality disorders, provides exact and detailed descriptions of a multitude of psychopathological symptoms. Koch's philosophical works are also discussed.

The article discusses information about the philosophy of psychiatry in the U.S. The history of the philosophies of psychiatry can be defined as the contextualized study of past theoretical views on the nature, understanding, and management of madness and related notions. The philosophy of psychiatry may expect or follow empirical research.

The article discusses the historical social construction of the most prevalent diagnosis of youth in the U.S. The country's psychiatry controls the definitions of mental health disorders and diagnosis through required practice utilization of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. A research is conducted through a social construction theoretical paradigm to identify diagnostic classification systems, nosology changes, and critical time periods.

The article discusses the views of psychoanalyst William Menninger on the future of American psychoanalysis. The author notes that in the aftermath of World War II, a struggle ensued over the direction of American psychoanalysis. Led by Menninger, who reluctantly assumed the presidency of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1946, a cohort of American-born psychoanalysts sought to make their profession more responsive to other medical practitioners and the general public. These psychoanalysts tried to promote a medicalized, Americanized and popularized version of psychoanalysis that deliberately blurred the distinction between psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

In this article the author presents the findings of a research about history of Norwegian psychiatry covering about 250 years. This comment concentrates briefly on the early Norwegian pre-psychiatric period up to 1850 and the social reactions to mental deviance. His main focus is the development of institutions, which in itself offers a measurement of public interest and approach to madness. This development was similar to the general trend in the rest of Scandinavia, but it seems, at least so far, to differ quite substantially from the traditional and mainly amateur historiography that has been dominant. The author also suggests three phases in the development of institutions: the gaol era, the madhouse era, and the asylum era. The findings suggest that Norwegian history of madness is crowded with gaols and workhouses.

The article examines Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger's view of the doctor-patient relationship as a direct and trusting existential encounter in a 1935 clinical case of hysteria. In the 1935 article derived from his lecture, Binswanger highlighted the importance of an existential relationship between patient and doctor in a case of hysteria. Unlike psychoanalytic transference, an existential relationship was built on trust, and did not merely repeat the dynamics of a patient's previous relationships but was a novel encounter in its own right. An existential relationship also guaranteed the efficacy of a range of therapies including somatic intervention, psychoanalytic treatment, moral influence and the restrictive guidelines of an authoritative figure, according to Binswanger.

The article reports on the history of Norwegian psychiatry. Until the end of World War II, psychiatry in Norway was mainly influenced by the German tradition. The first institution built especially for the mentally ill in Norway was the Oslo Hospital's "dollhus" which opened in 1778. The history of psychiatry before 1850 is mainly the history of the poor. In 1935 the Norwegian Labour Party formed a government with a social reform programme. After World War II, Norway gradually changed from an agrarian and fishing nation to an urban industrial state. After World War II Norwegian psychiatry was basically a hospital psychiatry, strong influenced by German psychiatry with its emphasis on classification, heredity and somatic treatment.

The article focuses on the ideas of psychiatrist Ewald Hecker on psychiatry. His idea at that age of onset and time course of an illness, together with close clinical observation, helps to delineate disease forms out of the mass of confusing psychiatric symptoms proved to be one of the most important paradigm shifts in middle to late nineteenth-century psychiatry. Hecker has the ability to convey complex ideas in an accessible form. Hecker identifies two main schools of psychiatry: those who believe that most psychiatric presentations reflect as many disease entities, and those who come to the opposite Unitarian conclusion advocating a single psychiatric disease which merely undergoes different stages.

This article briefly discusses the book "General Psychopathology: The History of the English Translation," by Karl Jaspers. This book is an eventful point in Anglophone psychiatry. The story of its making has no fireworks. The book had been translated into French and Japanese, but not into English. Descriptive Phenomenology proved essential to psychiatry, particularly for the differential diagnosis of the psychoses. This psychopathology had become known in France because of the 1928 translation of Jaspers' book, but remained unknown in the United States where narrative psychology was the only accepted psychopathology, largely, even up to the present.

The article discusses the transformation of the old concept of apparition into the concept of hallucination. According to the author, apparitions have been argued as the result of the existence of the external spirits or forces. It has been assured that the debate on the ontology and meaning of the "phantasms of the living" cannot influence the medical concept of hallucination.