This article reidentifies Wilhelm Mayer, author of the 1921 follow-up study of Kraepelin's cases of paraphrenia, and reconstructs his professional life across its German and American phases. Although Mayer's 1921 paper is still cited in the history of the concept of paraphrenia, the background of its author long remained obscure, and in recent literature he has at times been identified as Wilhelm Mayer-Gross, an attribution that provided the starting point for the present investigation. By collating published sources, dissertation records, obituaries, professional-society records, immigration records and local historical materials, this study examined whether the Mayer who worked in Tübingen and Munich was the same person as the William/Wilhelm Mayer who emigrated to the United States in 1936 and practised in New York. The evidence indicates that they were the same person: Wilhelm Mayer (1887-1956), who worked within the network linking Kraepelin, Gaupp and Brodmann before going into exile in the United States. A key piece of evidence is the identification of a 1911 dissertation on the prognosis of general paresis, rather than the 1901 dissertation previously attributed to him. Mayer's case shows how exile fragmented the documentary record of a career spanning Germany and the United States. His American career was predominantly clinical but continued to include scholarly work; nevertheless, the separation of the German and American records made it difficult for later historians of psychiatry to recognise them as belonging to the same person. The article thus offers a case for rethinking the history of the post-1933 emigration of German-speaking psychiatrists and neurologists in terms of fragmented professional careers and the asymmetry of documentary records.
This article reconstructs the administrative management of insanity in Wallachia between 1832 and 1839, prior to the establishment of the first psychiatric institution. Drawing on unpublished archival sources, it traces the procedural route through which individuals identified as insane were reported, evaluated, confined in monasteries and, in some cases, reintegrated into their communities. The analysis reveals a coherent administrative mechanism involving police authorities, central institutions and monastic infrastructure, within which madness functioned less as a medical category than as the outcome of a socially mediated process. The article challenges the dominant historiographical view that locates the beginnings of psychiatric governance in the emergence of the asylum, arguing instead for its earlier administrative formation.
This article uses Anne Sexton's therapy by Martin T. Orne as a frame for investigating and contextualising the unusual therapeutic rationale that lay behind her treatment. The rationale had three sources: the results of Orne's experimental psychological research, particularly the 'demand characteristics of social psychology experiments'; the functional sociology of Robert Merton and Talcott Parsons; and the influence of Jerome D. Frank's concept of 'effective hope'. Unpacking this story builds on the work of a number of historians who have destabilised one of the major binaries that has shaped historiographical interpretations of post-war psychiatry (i.e. biological psychiatry vs Freudianism), opens up a space for further investigations of interdisciplinarity in psychiatry, while providing a better understanding of why Orne treated Sexton the way he did.
This article traces the historical development of transcultural psychiatry in Sweden from the post-Second World War period to the early 21st century. It argues that the field emerged at the intersection of welfare universalism, humanitarian internationalism, and clinical encounters with migration-related distress. Shaped by labor migration and later refugee reception, Swedish transcultural psychiatry became strongly oriented toward trauma, particularly in relation to war and displacement. While this focus helped institutionalize specialized services and legitimize migrant suffering within psychiatric care, it also individualized structurally produced distress. The article further examines how Swedish exceptionalist self-understandings - especially notions of colorblindness and moral humanitarianism - both enabled and constrained the field, contributing to the relative neglect of racism and the mental health of national minorities.
Throughout the 20th century, women entered psychiatry, yet cinematic representations remained structured by masculinised archetypes such as Dr Evil, Dr Wonderful, and Dr Dippy. This article interrogates depictions of female psychiatrists in nineteen films and one paradigmatic television series (1935-2021) through a historically grounded qualitative analysis. It identifies two gendered figures - Dr Correction and Dr Trapped - that reconfigure the masculine triad into a moral continuum of care, control and vulnerability. By situating these tropes within psychiatry's shifting professional and moral framework, the study contends that visual media did not merely reflect psychiatry's feminisation but actively mediated it, producing new affective regimes of therapeutic authority. Cinema thus emerges as a site where psychiatry's gendered epistemologies were imagined, contested and negotiated.
The late 19th century witnessed a growing concern about the rising incidence of nervous disorders. Sociologists explained this with reference to the impacts of urbanisation, industrialisation and modernity. Medical practitioners identified psychological and physiological explanations for nervous disorders, focussing on a constellation of symptoms that became known as neurasthenia. While many commentators considered neurasthenia a condition of the middle classes, there was growing evidence that nervous disorders affected a wide range of the social spectrum, including the working class. We explore the prevalence of nervous disorders in the late 19th-century, using the British Post Office as a case study. We identify the significance of nervous disorders as a cause of sickness absence and of retirement, taking note of occupation and gender as key variables. We examine the contrasting explanations offered by management and workers for the incidence of nervous disorders, pointing to the significance of specific labour practices on different groups of workers. We compare our findings with those in other industries in the 20th century and conclude that similar rates of nervous disorders occurred across time and in different kinds of occupations. We conclude by suggesting that different working conditions were a significant factor in explaining the incidence of nervous disorders and that this needs to be taken into account by historians alongside more traditional explanations of nervousness based on social change and the impact of modernity on the human psyche.
This article revisits a little-known lecture by René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec (1781-1826), best known as the inventor of the stethoscope, focusing instead on his reflections on mental illness-what he termed vesanias. Delivered at the Collège de France in 1823, the lecture predates modern psychiatry and offers a rare, nuanced view of mental disorders at the crossroads of clinical medicine, philosophy, and Enlightenment moral thought. Laennec distinguishes between five types of mental illness-hallucinations, monomania, mania, dementia, and idiocy-while rejecting the reductionist views of his contemporaries who sought anatomical lesions as the sole cause. His classification emphasizes gradation, subjective experience, and the blending of pathology with normal human faculties such as imagination, emotion, and belief. He critiques the dominant anatomical paradigm, notably the views of Broussais, and advocates for a moral and observational approach to mental care. His views prefigure modern biopsychosocial models and anticipate concepts such as shared psychosis and dimensional spectra in psychiatry. By refusing to isolate madness from social, cultural, or historical contexts, Laennec offers a deeply human and still-relevant vision of mental illness-one that challenges us to rethink psychiatry beyond biological determinism and diagnostic rigidity.
This paper examines the instrumentalisation of psychiatric procedures and the complicity of physicians and mental health professionals in the state-sponsored terror of Argentina's civil-military dictatorship (1976-1983). Hitherto, these episodes have remained largely underexplored in broader historiography, as have their implications for modern psychiatric ethics. Drawing on archival records, victim testimonies, and secondary sources, this paper outlines how mental health expertise and psychiatric institutions were implicated in the junta's campaigns to subjugate perceived "subversive" tendencies in Argentinian society. To that end, two case descriptions are used to illustrate distinctive modalities of abuse: (1) the "depersonalisation" and "brainwashing" of political detainees in Rawson Prison in Argentinian Patagonia, where psychiatrists and psychologists participated in experimental repression programmes; and (2) the transfer of torture-induced psychiatric patients to military-controlled hospitals, where coercive pharmacological interventions, electroconvulsive therapy, and further physical violence were inflicted. The analysis highlights psychiatry's function as a mechanism for direct torture and a legitimising veneer for political persecution. In doing so, it integrates previously fragmented materials into a unified analytical framework and situates psychiatric abuses within wider transnational patterns of repression characteristic of other Latin American dictatorships. Moreover, in the context of contemporaneous denialist narratives in Argentina and ongoing international instances of psychiatric abuse worldwide, the paper underlines the persistent vulnerability of ethical safeguards, reemphasising calls for proactive measures to protect against future human rights violations.
This paper traces the career trajectories of four Irish doctors - Edward Mazière Courtenay, Oscar Woods, Edward Levinge, and James Wallis - all of whom gained early clinical experience in psychological medicine whilst working at the West Riding Asylum in Wakefield, England, during the 1870s, the era during which this county asylum for paupers aspired to be a "research school" for the study of insanity. An attempt is made to examine whether, as a result of their experiences at Wakefield, these clinicians introduced research practices or any of the innovations of the West Riding Asylum, such as a dedicated pathological laboratory, into the Irish public system of district asylums. The evidence indicates that no such developments occurred in Ireland, despite two of the four clinicians, Courtenay and Woods, achieving positions of considerable authority within the profession on their return to Ireland. Possible reasons for this absence of research in Irish asylums during the latter part of the 19th century are explored.
This article examines the changing role of family involvement in caring for female mental patients in the Straits Settlements from the late 19th century to 1930. Using Reports, Medical Department records, and correspondence, it shows how colonial policy gradually shifted responsibility from hospitals to households, especially for women with mild or stabilised illness. What began as a response to overcrowding evolved into efforts to educate families, promote visitation, and build ties. Home routines and activities reframed mental illness from supernatural to medical and domestic terms. Families faced economic strains but became central to recovery and reintegration through care and handicrafts. By 1930, it was extended to the Federated Malay States, reflecting negotiated caregiving shaped by gender norms and kinship.
In 1941, Hervey Cleckley's The Mask of Sanity crystalized 35 years of American psychiatric negotiation of psychopathy with a durable image of a superficially charming but inherently destructive man. American psychiatric institutions began classifying some patients as psychopaths in 1906 when prominent psychiatrist Adolf Meyer imported the concept from Europe. Initially, American psychopaths were a diverse group of delinquent misfits, weak of will and ill-suited to social life. In the ensuing decades, the psychopath morphed from an unattractive, suggestible failure into a hypermasculine, pitiless achiever. This article traces the concept of psychopathy in American psychiatric literature between Meyer's introduction and Cleckley's articulation to show how the ideals of mental hygiene and the narrative power of Cleckley's portrait contributed to this gendered winnowing of the category.
This article explores the introduction of the 1930 Mental Treatment Act (MTA) and places it within a longer-term trajectory of the development of acute services. While many historians have considered the apparent novelty of the MTA, they have tended to see the development of outpatients clinics as separate from the ongoing demand on in-patient services. Using patient case files from the West Riding Mental Hospital, in the northern English county of Yorkshire, consideration is given to the links and overlaps between the creation of the new legalistic categories of temporary and voluntary inpatients and the development of outpatients clinics over the longer-term. Using quantitative and qualitative evidence it demonstrates the continuities in terms of the provision of services and the financial limitations that impacted on their delivery. While attention is paid to the medical story, including the place of female psychiatrists and social workers in the delivery of services, this article emphasises the role of patients, families and non-specialist practitioners in their successes and failures.
This article uses British drama film No Place for Jennifer (1950) to argue for the evidential value of staged content of real psychotherapeutic places (Institute of Child Psychology) and practices (Margaret Lowenfeld's World Technique). In the absence of 'real' documentary footage, discoveries of recreated therapeutic spaces within largely forgotten genre films can help reconstruct histories of the 'psy' sciences whilst offering insight into the contestations specific sites and practices provoked. Employing Baron's reformulation from 'documentary' to 'archival document', it demonstrates that content extracted from previously disregarded films can fill archival lacunas whilst expanding both 'what can be said' about the past and how it can be said.
Between 1960 and 1985 efforts to reform psychiatry took place in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Although to differing degrees, these efforts showed parallel approaches, for example with regard to negotiations on coercion or the participation of mentally ill people. Oral history interviews conducted with contemporary witnesses from both states suggested changes in the direction of the reform of psychiatry and progress in social participation during the period. Contrasting historical sources with the interviews reveals a dissonance that can be understood in terms of discourse theory. Initial results indicate a convergence, across different political systems, toward improving social participation. Future research would benefit from cross reading this study's results with other sources.
Schizophrenia has remained from its conception one of psychopathology's most debated topics. Karl Jaspers' theorem of its "incomprehensibility" has been particularly influential, often reduced to the impossibility of empathic understanding within the clinical encounter. Contemporary critiques, however, frequently misinterpret Jaspers' phenomenological framework, overlooking the broader scope of its thought. This paper proposes a reinterpretation of Jaspers' incomprehensibility theorem by distinguishing three interconnected levels: (1) phenomenological, as closed to empathic understanding; (2) biographical, as a rupture in the continuity of meaning across personal development; and (3) existential, as the impossibility of grasping a person's Existence. By revisiting these dimensions, we argue for a hermeneutic revaluation of Jaspers' theorem, highlighting its relevance for contemporary discussions on the longitudinality of psychopathology.
This study investigates the role of medical, and in particular psychiatric, care in the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen remand prison, situated within the repressive state security apparatus of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Drawing on 11 oral history interviews with former political prisoners, two physicians in different capacities, and a lawyer, it examines the tensions between the professional mandate of care and the political embedding of medical practice. The central question is how doctors navigated a system that structurally intertwined care and control. The findings reveal a complex and ambivalent picture. Physicians frequently emphasised adherence to professional standards and ethical duties, and some exercised limited autonomy to influence treatment decisions. Yet, detainees describe medical care as intermittently available, often instrumentalised for political purposes, and sometimes experienced as distant or dismissive. Psychiatric interventions were rarely applied solely for therapeutic ends, but rather to maintain detainees' functional capacity for interrogation and to produce usable expert witness reports. Medical records were systematically communicated to the secret police, effectively suspending confidentiality. Reports of sedation during interrogation further highlight unresolved ethical and practical tensions. Overall, the study demonstrates that medical expertise in this context was both constrained and deployed in ways that reinforced state control, yet individual physicians occasionally exercised agency within these restrictions. By juxtaposing professional self-perceptions with detainees' experiences, the research contributes to a nuanced historical reassessment of medicine under authoritarian conditions. It underscores the duality of care and coercion, the uneven distribution of agency, and the moral dilemmas faced by medical personnel.
