Psychiatric Cultures Compared: Psychiatry and Mental Health Care in the Twentieth Century: Comparisons and Approaches

Extract

This volume provides a series of historical overviews of psychiatry and mental health care in the Netherlands, Britain, the United States, Germany (both East and West) and France. It also includes focused thematic studies derived from research in Japan, Italy and Sweden, and a number of the essays offer global overviews, including two concluding reflective chapters which attempt a synthesis of the work as a whole. The specific aims of the collection, as explained by its editors, are to compare Dutch developments in psychiatry with those in some other western countries, thereby investigating national exceptionalism; and to present new approaches and promising research topics. With eighteen chapters in total, it is difficult to do justice here to all the separate authors and their contributions. This review therefore evaluates the international or global scope offered by the editors.

In the now vast field of the history of psychiatry, this new book makes several original contributions to knowledge and scholarship. Its specific achievements include its impressive range and scope, with individual chapters covering many national contexts; its concern with comparative approaches and global overviews, with an emphasis on drawing together the often disparate focused studies of place; and its attention to the ‘cultures’ of psychiatry. The book includes focused sections on psychiatric patients and their families, gender and welfare; psychiatric nursing; and one chapter about psychotropic drugs. The history of community or out-patient psychiatric care is explored in several chapters, as are the differing and shared histories of the anti-psychiatry movement.