Psychiatry and Public Order

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.