Psychiatry and Public Order

by

Anastassiya Schacht

• LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780197768723-0046

Introduction

Psychiatry is a medical specialty dealing with mental disease, including its biological and environmental antecedents, progress, treatment, and prognosis in experience of individual patients and larger statistically relevant population groups. In its general focus on human psyche, it is linked to other related disciplines, such as psychology, psychotherapy, and neurology. In the domain of humanities, psychiatry shares a certain overlap of interest with cultural anthropology, social studies, history, and related fields. The latter disciplines add a new perspective as they turn psychiatry into an object of inquiry and critical reflection. Here, psychiatry is approached as a broad field of knowledge adapting to complex social structures and settings (the sociological perspective) and dynamically changing over time (history). The history of psychiatry analyzes how societies approached the issue of mental illness and treated the mentally ill over time. Philosophy and the history of religion also come into play owing to a long-standing tradition of seeing mental disease as a punishment for spiritual or later secular moral “wrongdoing.” The criticism of such approaches instigated a broad public debate, often carried out by intellectuals from both within and beyond the medical discipline. Society’s norms concerning accepted individual attitudes and emotions, and their manifestations through adherence to or rejection of public order, mirror these societies’ ideas about the sane and the insane. These norms may or may not include creativity, spiritual practices, consumption of neuroactive substances, and practices of performing both stable and dynamic social roles such as age, ethnical, and cultural belonging; gender; sex and many more. Legal sciences and forensics must also be mentioned, where psychiatry helps to comprehend motifs behind breaches of commonly accepted, codified, and state-enforced rules of societal cohabitation. All these elements constitute the public order in its broad conceptual frame that allows for reflected contextualization of psychiatry’s role. This bibliography adopts an interdisciplinary approach that allows us to comprehensively engage with various aspects of public order and psychiatry’s place, role, and contribution to society at the broadest level. It introduces a selection of current publications on psychiatry and public order as seen and researched by interdisciplinary crossroads between psychiatry proper, history of science, social science, philosophy, legal studies, and more. The selection seeks to strike a balance between established must-reads and recent publications. Some publications will meet the interest of ongoing medical practitioners. Others will appeal to scholars dealing with psychiatry from the viewpoint of humanities. Finally, some of the enlisted works introduce relevant aspects of psychiatry to generally educated audiences who seek an overview of how psyche-related disciplines are approached and studied.

General Overviews: Psyche and Psychiatry in Societies over Time

This section lists works that discuss the evolution of the psychiatric discipline and how doing psychiatry and thinking about it changed over time. Foucault 2009 offers an overview of how the notions of sanity and insanity developed across Western societies since the medieval age, while Foucault 2006 discusses how societies heed the stability of public order by deciding which behavior is to be accepted as sane and which as mad. Bernet 2013 discusses how medical understanding of schizophrenia emerged in late-19th-century Switzerland and contributed to the professionalization of the psychiatric profession. Garrabé 2003 reviews the development of medical and public understanding of schizophrenia throughout the twentieth century. Engstrom 2018 surveys the development of mental health care in 19th-century Germany. Millard and Wallis 2022 is a collection of sources produced by and on behalf of the psychiatric discipline that were crucial to its development from the nineteenth century onward. The last four works discuss how psychiatry and its role changed alongside larger political, social, and medical developments throughout the twentieth century. Taylor and Brumby 2020 studies how psychiatry’s therapeutic space and confinement regimes gradually changed, moving away from larger asylums and toward a community-integrated care. Wall 2018 analyzes how the rise of the anti-psychiatric movement in Great Britain affected psychiatry and the ways audiences perceived this discipline. Shorter 2021 studies the course, progress, boundaries, and persisting effect of the disciplinary transformation imposed by the introduction of psychopharmacological medication. Rounding up this section, Doroshow, et al. 2018 comprehensively surveys trends of the last decades in the history of psychiatry and suggests further development trajectories for topics so far less covered by historiography of this discipline.

• Bernet, Brigitta, Schizophrenie: Entstehung und Entwicklung eines psychiatrischen Krankheitsbilds um 1900. Zürich: Chronos, 2013.

  A monograph by a Swiss German author that reconstructs the history of psychiatry as a discipline, and its place and function in society, by explaining how the medical and social understandings of schizophrenia emerged and developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in central Europe.

• Doroshow, Deborah, Matthew Gambino, and Mical Raz. “New Directions in the Historiography of Psychiatry.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 74.1 (2018): 15–33.

  DOI: 10.1093/jhmas/jry040

  Reviews developments in the historiography of psychiatry that, for the US academic community, largely started with Gerald Grob’s works. Mostly focusing on US scholarship, it reconstructs the origins, central names, and thematic focuses of several distinctive approaches to the history of psychiatry in the United States. The second part of the text discusses approaches and aspects of psychiatry that remain less studied and might be of interest to future historiographic research.

• Engstrom, Eric J. Clinical Psychiatry in Imperial Germany: A History of Psychiatric Practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018.

  Offers a panoramic study of the theory-building, practices, places, and personalities that shaped the psychiatric discipline and its position in imperial Germany’s public and legal discourse in the late nineteenth century.

• Foucault, Michel. Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College De France, 1973–1974. Michel Foucault Lectures at the Collège de France. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

  DOI: 10.1007/978-0-230-37298-6

  This collection of lectures polemicizes how societies in western Europe grew to firmly associate deviant thinking and public behavior with mental disease after the Enlightenment. In shifting sanity and insanity away from religion and ethics, increasingly secular states made mental health an area of continuous intervention for science and public governance. Among others, Foucault offers his own philosophical system for how the therapeutic space of mental asylums must be treated and interpreted as a very specific (heterotopic) space with unique, established, and uneven hierarchies of therapeutic power and submission.

• Foucault, Michel. History of Madness. London: Routledge, 2009.

  Central to understanding how Western liberal societies of the twentieth century grew to understand psychiatric health and disease, this work reconstructs how European societies imagined insanity, used it as a tool, and shunned its power to subvert social order.

• Garrabé, Jean. La Schizophrénie: Un siècle pour comprendre. Paris: Les Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond/Le Seuil, 2003.

  This French monograph traces the development of the psychiatric discipline, practice, and connection to the public order by following the development of the discipline’s central diagnostic token, schizophrenia. The author intertwines historical analysis with his personal recollections of seminal debates and professional conventions in the psychiatric community during the second half of the twentieth century, thus allowing for a first-person insight into the makings of present-day psychiatry.

• Millard, Chris, and Jennifer Wallis, eds. Sources in the History of Psychiatry, from 1800 to the Present. London and New York: Routledge, 2022.

  Studies how changing administration routines (e.g., patient registers—Sarg et al.) and technological advancement (photography—Pichel) influenced therapeutic, scholarly, and popular understandings of psychiatry. Contributions also cover patients’ agency and popular art as means for psychiatry’s dialogue with the broader audiences.

• Shorter, Edward. The Rise and Fall of the Age of Psychopharmacology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

  DOI: 10.1093/med/9780197574430.001.0001

  Delivers a comprehensive and detailed analysis of how the creation of psychopharmacological medications shaped psychiatric discipline. Reconstructs the societal context into which the discovery of psychopharmacological effects upon the psyche and specifically upon mental disease was placed. Also reviews trials of several first-generation psychotropic medications and reconstructs debates on their applicability in different diseases and clinical pictures. Also discusses the boundaries of psychopharmacological intervention and traces how the initial enthusiasm over psychopharmacological treatment gave place to more sober and restrictive approaches.

• Taylor, Steven J., and Alice Brumby. Healthy Minds in the Twentieth Century: In and Beyond the Asylum. Corrected publication. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

  DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-27275-3

  Provides a comprehensive overview of some prominent developments in psychiatry in Western(ized) societies throughout the twentieth century. Thematic scope includes campaigns against stigmatization of disability, public engagement against substance abuse, early postwar British efforts for the employment of the mentally ill, the history of autism diagnosis, and a brief review of psychiatry in popular culture (science fiction).

• Wall, Oisin. The British Anti-Psychiatrists: From Institutional Psychiatry to the Counter-Culture, 1960–1971. New York: Routledge, 2018.

  Spotlights the rise of anti-psychiatry in the United Kingdom as an example of the 1960s paradigmatic change in psychiatry and public perception of the discipline. Thematizes the postwar dynamics toward a more open and less hierarchic establishment of psychiatric care across Western liberal democracies, the broadening public discontent and contest of medical authority on madness, and the contest of medical authority through the anti-psychiatric movement.