Historiographical Themes in the History of Psychiatry

by

Benoît Majerus

• LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780197768723-0043

Introduction

The history of psychiatry is contemporary to the establishment of psychiatry as a specialty itself. Indeed, those who strove to define psychiatry as a distinct scientific medical discipline sought out predecessors to legitimize the discipline. Therefore, there has been a history of psychiatry, written by psychiatrists, since the mid-nineteenth century. However, beginning in the 1950s, scholars in the social sciences—including anthropologists, sociologists, and historians—began offering alternative, sometimes competing, narratives to those put forward by these practitioner-historians. This ongoing tension has proven to be particularly fruitful, as psychiatry has become one of the most researched specialties in the history of medicine, over-represented in major medical history journals and even having its own dedicated publication, History of Psychiatry. Over the past seventy years, sources used to write this history have diversified considerably. Initially, the focus was limited to published handbooks and articles by well-known white male psychiatrists. Over time, the range of materials has broadened to include other writings by physicians (such as medical notes, personal journals, and letters between colleagues) as well as documentation from other sources, including local and regional asylum administrations, patients and their families, and other people in other occupations, such as nurses, psychologists, and social workers. This shift has transformed the narrative from a purely medical perspective to a more multifaceted and inclusive story. In the past two decades, the history of psychiatry has faced a challenge similar to that of psychiatry itself: defining the boundaries of the discipline. Since the 1960s, when psychiatry moved beyond the asylum, it gained new areas of intervention but also encountered new scientific discourses that either complemented or contested it. These blurred boundaries have also affected the writing of its history, which has become less tied to the medical discipline. Often, a thematic approach is taken, highlighting the multiplicity of actors involved, the diversification of spaces, and the specialization of therapies.

General Overviews

Compared to other medical disciplines, the history of psychiatry has a strikingly vibrant, diverse, and long-standing historiography. Eghigian 2017 represents the most recent collective effort to provide an international overview of current research. Scull 2015 offers a similar perspective in an engaging single-author work. Coleborne 2019 goes beyond the community of historians with a thought-provoking essay on the role of history in broader discussions of mental health. Millard and Wallis 2022 highlights both the challenges and opportunities presented by the wide range of sources used in contemporary psychiatric historiography.

• Coleborne, Catharine. Why Talk about Madness? Bringing History into the Conversation. London: Palgrave, 2019.

  Makes a convincing case for why history is necessary if we want to address mental health issues.

• Eghigian, Greg, ed. The Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health. Basingstoke, UK: Taylor & Francis, 2017.

  This edited volume brings together nearly twenty researchers who provide insights organized chronologically (e.g., Chiara Thumiger on Antiquity), geographically (e.g., Sally Swartz on Africa), and thematically (e.g., Jesse Ballenger on aging).

• Millard, Chris, and Jennifer Wallis, eds. Sources in the History of Psychiatry, from 1800 to the Present. London: Taylor & Francis, 2022.

  For a long time, writing a history of psychiatry that went beyond well-known psychiatrists ran into the challenge of accessing archives. Chris Millard and Jennifer Wallis present the range of archives that are available for writing a multi-voiced history of madness, while also addressing the ethical questions involved in this research.

• Scull, Andrew. Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.

  DOI: 10.2307/j.ctvc77hvc

  Written by one of the most prolific and also most controversial historians of the field, the book is a tour de force on how insanity has been handled for over 2,500 years.