From Madness to Psychopathology: Mental Illness and Mental Health in Historical Perspective

Mental illness and mental health, as diagnoses and as experiences, have not remained constant over time. Those who displayed unusual behaviors were once denounced as witches or locked up in asylums; now they are more likely to be considered differently neurologically wired or offered drugs or psychotherapy. Not only has the stigma attached to mental illness changed but the very categories themselves, the labels, and the behaviors associated with them, have come into existence or disappeared over time: hysteria is no more, while post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are relatively recent arrivals. This course examines the making and unmaking of categories and concepts of mental illness, from the nineteenth-century era of asylums, through deinstitutionalization, the normalization of psychotherapy, and the growth of psychopharmacology to what some call our current therapeutic culture and its wholesale embrace of mental health, the reinvention of psychology as a health profession, and the exporting of US psychiatric disease categories abroad. The course analyzes these significant scientific and medical, as well as cultural and political, shifts in three arenas: in changing approaches to diagnosis and treatment in psychology and psychiatry (for example, from psychoanalysis to cognitive behavior therapy and in ongoing revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders); in people's lived experiences of mental illness in memoir; and in images and portrayals of madness in fiction and film.