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Historians have examined the role of psychiatric institutions in the USA and addressed whether this form of care helped or harmed patients (depending on the perspective of the time period, historical actors, and historians). But the story for children's mental institutions was different. At the time when adult institutions were in decline, children's mental hospitals were expanding. Parents and advocates clamoured for more beds and more services. The decrease in facilities for children was more due to economic factors than ideological opposition. This paper explores a case study of a hospital in Michigan as a window into the different characteristics of the discussion of psychiatric care for children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article surveys evolving and competing medico-legal concepts of pyromania and insane arson. Exploiting evidence from medical jurisprudence, medico-legal publications, medical lexicography and case histories, it seeks to explicate the key positions in contemporary professional debates concerning arson and mental derangement. A major focus is the application of the doctrines of moral and partial insanity, monomania, instinctive insanity and irresistible impulse to understandings of pyromania and insane arson. The limited extent to which mental defect provided a satisfactory diagnosis and exculpatory plea for morbid arson is also explored. Additionally, this article compares and contrasts contemporary debates about other special manias, especially kleptomania. Part 2 will be published in the next issue, History of Psychiatry 21(4). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 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.

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.