#387 Greg Eghigian: The History of Mental Illness and Psychiatry
RECORDED ON SEPTEMBER 4th 2020.
Dr. Greg Eghigian is Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University. A historian of both the human sciences and modern Europe, he is particularly interested in how societies grapple with the questions and problems associated with modernity through the vehicles of science, technology, and medicine. His research has largely focused on the nature of power and the relationship between the state, science, and medicine in understanding and managing things such as disability, deviance, criminality, mental illness, and security. And he regularly writes articles and present papers on the general history of madness and psychiatry. In recent years, his interests have moved into studying the history of supernatural and paranormal phenomena.
In this episode, we talk about the history of mental illness and psychiatry. We discuss how to properly address the history of mental illness, and the cultural and political elements of mental illness. We address the questions of how mentally ill people were treated in premodern times, if people thought they could be cured, and if they were always stigmatized. Then, we talk about the advent of psychiatry, how people viewed suicide historically, Foucault and the exercise of power over the mentally ill, and the history of talk therapy. Finally, we ask if psychiatry is a science, and we discuss the history of institutionalization and the deinstitutionalization movement in psychiatry.
Time Links:
How to properly think about mental illness from a historical perspective
Culture and mental illness
Retrospective diagnoses of historical figures
The politics of mental illness
Was there a soviet or communist psychiatry?
How mentally ill people were treated in premodern times
Were mentally ill people always stigmatized?
The advent of psychiatry
How people viewed suicide
Foucault, and the exercise of power
The history of talk therapy
Is psychiatry a science?
The deinstitutionalization movement in psychiatry
Why were people institutionalized?
Follow Dr. Eghigian’s work!
Follow Dr. Eghigian’s work:
Faculty page: https://bit.ly/2Z9Z3ui
H-madness blog: https://bit.ly/2Gx0tbZ
Books on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3jKP7PU