Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part I Medicine and Disease: An Overview
- Part II Changing Concepts of Health and Disease
- II.1 Concepts of Disease in the West
- II.2 Concepts of Disease in East Asia
- II.3 Concepts of Mental Illness in the West
- II.4 Sexual Deviance as a Disease
- II.5 Concepts of Heart-Related Diseases
- II.6 Concepts of Cancer
- Part III Medical Specialties and Disease Prevention
- Part IV Measuring Health
- Part V The History of Human Disease in the World Outside Asia
- Part VI The History of Human Disease in Asia
- Part VII The Geography of Human Disease
- Part VIII Major Human Diseases Past and Present
- Indexes
- References
II.3 - Concepts of Mental Illness in the West
from Part II - Changing Concepts of Health and Disease
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Edited by
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part I Medicine and Disease: An Overview
- Part II Changing Concepts of Health and Disease
- II.1 Concepts of Disease in the West
- II.2 Concepts of Disease in East Asia
- II.3 Concepts of Mental Illness in the West
- II.4 Sexual Deviance as a Disease
- II.5 Concepts of Heart-Related Diseases
- II.6 Concepts of Cancer
- Part III Medical Specialties and Disease Prevention
- Part IV Measuring Health
- Part V The History of Human Disease in the World Outside Asia
- Part VI The History of Human Disease in Asia
- Part VII The Geography of Human Disease
- Part VIII Major Human Diseases Past and Present
- Indexes
- References
Summary
Mental disease refers, at present, to disorders of perception, cognition, emotion, and behavior. The disorder may be mild or severe, acute or chronic, and may be attributed to a defect of mind or body or of some unknown combination of the two. A diagnosis of mental illness is the judgment that an individual is impaired in his or her capacity to think, feel, or relate to others. In mild cases, the impairment may intrude on a person’s ability to gain satisfaction from meeting the challenges of everyday life. In severe instances, an individual may be thought so dangerous or incompetent that sequestration within a psychiatric facility is necessary, with a resulting loss of rights normally granted to citizens.
The Problem of Mental Illness
The simple title of this section belies the extraordinary scope, complexity, and controversial state of contemporary psychiatric thought. Some have argued that if the myriad types of disorders bedeviling humankind were ranked by the net misery and incapacitation they caused, we would discover that psychiatry captures a larger share of human morbidity than does any other medical specialty. It seems ironic - if not tragic - that a clinical field of such magnitude is at the same time distinguished among its peers by a conspicuous lack of therapeutic and philosophical consensus. That the discipline lacks a set of internal standards by which to differentiate unequivocally the correct theory from the false, or the efficacious therapy from the useless, is an open secret.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge World History of Human Disease , pp. 59 - 85Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993
References
1978. The influence of psychoanalysis upon American culture. In American psychoanalysis: Origins and development, ed. and . New York.Google Scholar
1981. Theory and practice in British psychiatry from J. C. Prichard (1785–1848) to Henry Maudsley (1835–1918). Nihon Ishigaku Zasshi 27.Google Scholar
1983. Psychiatry in its historical context. In Handbook of Psychiatry, Vol. 1, ed. and . Cambridge.Google Scholar
1984. Alcoholism and degeneration in 19th-century European medicine and psychiatry. British Journal of Addiction 79.Google ScholarPubMed
, , and , eds. 1985–8. The anatomy of madness: Essays in the history of psychiatry, 3 vols. London.Google Scholar
, and . 1962. The meaning of moral insanity. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 36.Google ScholarPubMed
1988. How to do the history of psychoanalysis: A reading of Freud’s three essays on the theory of sexuality. In The trial(s) of psychoanalysis, ed. . Chicago.Google Scholar
1988. Editorial: The social construction of mental illness. Psychological Medicine 18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
1970. The discovery of the unconscious: The history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry. New York.Google Scholar
1972. Hypochondriasis of the eighteenth century – neurosis of the present century. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 46.Google ScholarPubMed
1965. Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. . New York.Google Scholar
1985. Cultural habits of illness: The enlightened and the pious in eighteenth–century Germany. In Patients and practitioners, ed. . Cambridge.Google Scholar
1982. The hysteria diagnosis and the politics of anticlericalism in late nineteenth-century France. Journal of Modern History 54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
1987. Console and classify: The French psychiatric profession in the nineteenth century. New York.Google Scholar
1982. Somatic theories of mind and the interests of medicine in Britain, 1850–1879. Medical History 26.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
1974. Medical knowledge and the patronage system in 18th-century England. Sociology 8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
1987. Changing faces of madness: Early American attitudes and treatment of the insane. Hanover, N.H..Google Scholar
1979. The nervous system and society in the Scottish Enlightenment. In Natural order: Historical studies of scientific cultures, ed. and . London.Google Scholar
1981. Mystical bedlam: Madness, anxiety and healing in seventeenth-century England. Cambridge.Google Scholar
1982. Religion, social change, and psychological healing in England, 1600–1800. In The church and healing, ed. . Oxford.Google Scholar
1980. Madness and civilization in early modern Europe. In After the Reformation: Essays in honor of J. H. Hexter, ed. . Philadephia.Google Scholar
. 1980. Historical and theoretical trends in psychiatry. In Comprehensive textbook of psychiatry, 3d edition, ed. , , and . Baltimore.Google Scholar
1979. Medicine and the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century England. Bulletin of the Society of the Social History of Medicine 25.Google ScholarPubMed
1983. The rage of party: A glorious revolution in English psychiatry? Medical History 27.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
1987. Mind-forg’d manacles: A history of madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency. Cambridge, Mass.Google Scholar
1979. The “subliminal” versus the “subconscious” in the American acceptance of psychoanalysis, 1906–1910. Journal of the History of Behavioral Science 15.Google ScholarPubMed
1981. Models of madness in Victorian asylum practice. Archives of European Sociology 22.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
1988. Hysteria at the Edinburgh infirmary: The construction and treatment of a disease, 1770–1800. Medical History 32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
1968. The trial of the assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and law in the Gilded Age. Chicago.Google Scholar
1989. Body and mind in the nineteenth-century medicine: Some clinical origins of the neurosis construct. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 63.Google Scholar
1971. The discovery of the asylum: Social order and disorder in the New Republic. Boston.Google Scholar
1980. Conscience and convenience: The asylum and its alternatives in progressive America. Boston.Google Scholar
1976. Nerves, spirits and fibres: Towards defining the origins of sensibility. Studies in the Eighteenth Century 3.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
1975. From madness to mental illness: Medical men as moral entrepreneurs. European Journal of Sociology 16.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
1982. Museums of madness: The social organization of insanity in nineteenth-century England. New York.Google Scholar
1986. Victorian lunacy: Richard M. Bucke and the practice of late nineteenth-century psychiatry. New York.Google Scholar
. 1977. The uses of a diagnosis: Doctors, patients, and neurasthenia. Journal of the History of Medicine 32.Google ScholarPubMed
1972. The hysterical woman: Sex roles and conflict in nineteenth-century America. Social Research 39.Google Scholar
, and . 1980. Classification in psychiatry. In Comprehensive textbook of psychiatry, 3d edition, ed. , , and . Baltimore.Google Scholar
. 1971. The falling sickness: A history of epilepsy from the Greeks to the beginnings of modern neurology, 2d edition. Baltimore.Google Scholar
, ed. 1987. Diagnosis and classification in psychiatry: A critical appraisal ofDSM–III. New York.Google Scholar
. 1984. A generous confidence: Thomas Storykirkbride and the art of asylum–building, 1840–1883. Cambridge.Google Scholar
- 5
- Cited by