Historiographical Themes in the History of Psychiatry

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.