From Madness to Psychopathology

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 PTSD and anorexia nervosa are relatively recent arrivals. This course will examine the making and unmaking of categories and concepts of mental illness, from the 19th century era of asylums, through deinstitutionalization and the normalization of psychotherapy, to the growth of psychopharmacology, to what some call our current therapeutic culture, its wholesale embrace of mental health, and the reinvention of psychology as a health profession, to the exporting of US psychiatric disease categories abroad. The course will analyze 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 CBT); in peoples lived experiences of mental illness, in memoir; and in images and portrayals of madness in fiction and film.