Reoccuring Concepts Flashcards
Transition from Madness to Mental Illness
Early understandings of mental health categorized issues under “madness” rather than structured diagnoses.
Evidence:
- Vagrancy Act of 1714: distinguished between “pauper lunatics” and criminals, initiating the confinement of mentally ill individuals, funded by taxes, as a measure to ensure public safety.
- The York retreat: emphasized kindness over punishment, introducing “moral treatment” as a means of addressing madness
Medicalization
Mental health evolved from spiritual and social domains into a medical field, where conditions were increasingly seen as biologically rooted.
Evidence:
- Emil Kraepelin: emphasized that mental disorders were discrete, biological diseases with specific symptoms, courses, and treatments
- DSM development: addition of Gender Identity Disorder (DSM III) and later Gender Dysphoria (DSM 5), exemplify the process of defining and redefining behaviors and identities as medical conditions
- Eugenics: used medical arguments to justify sterilization programs for those deemed mentally unfit, further medicalizing societal fears about “degeneration”
Power and Control
Psychiatry has been criticized as a tool for enforcing social norms and power.
- Foucault critique: described psychiatry as defining “normality,” creating boundaries for acceptable behavior and justifying interventions in people’s lives
- Total institutions: escribed how asylums replaced individuality with institutional identities, stripping patients of autonomy
- social control theory: posited that asylums were “dumping grounds” for social outcasts, reinforcing societal order
Eugenics and Heredity
The belief in hereditary mental illness led to harmful practices such as forced sterilizations under the eugenics movement
- 20th C rise: romoted sterilization programs and policies to prevent those with mental illnesses from reproducing
- Nazi T4 program: targeted mentally ill individuals, testing systems later used during the Holocaust
- Lombroso: suggested that physical appearance could predict criminality, fueling discrimination and national fears of degeneration
Social Psychiatry
Community mental health initiatives in the mid-20th century sought to address societal issues but were limited by political and financial constraints
- Social psychiatry movement: studies found that mental health issues often stemmed from socioeconomic conditions rather than purely biological causes
- Community mental health act: aimed to replace asylums with community-based mental health care, signaling a shift toward systemic approaches
- mental hygiene: argued that it was easier to prevent mental illness by focusing on societal reforms and psychoeducation
Deinstitutionalization
The move away from asylums to community care
- institution critiques: criticized for inhumane conditions, leading to deinstitutionalization in favor of community care
- Ashley smith: illustrates the failures of the carceral system as a replacement for mental health care. Her death, following years of segregation and mistreatment in prison, highlights the inadequacies of this approach
- trans-institutionalization: the shift of mentally ill individuals from hospitals to prisons—exacerbated issues rather than solving them.
Global Mental Health Movement
The push to globalize mental health care often imposes Western frameworks on non-Western cultures
- Lancet’s Global Mental Health Movement: promoted scaling up mental health services worldwide but often imposed Western frameworks on non-Western cultures, disregarding local contexts
- Latvia Case: the traditional concept of nervi was replaced by “depression,” reflecting the global standardization of mental health diagnoses, often at the expense of cultural relevance
- Colonialism
Marginalization
- Gender and psychiatry: Hysteria, Female Orgasmic disorder, psychoanalysis (framed women’s neuroses as stemming from “penis envy” and depicted them as cold, frigid, or irrational if they transgressed gender norms)
- LGBTQ+ Communities: Gender Dysphoria, Fruit Machine,
- Racial Marginalization: Black patients made up 21% of the patient population in British hospitals despite being only 7% of the general population. They were also more likely to receive severe diagnoses like schizophrenia, Protest Psychosis (reframed civil rights activism by African American men as a symptom of schizophrenia, linking justified anger with mental instability. )
Institutions Shaping Mental Health
Institutions like asylums, hospitals, prisons, and community care centers have historically served as mechanisms for managing and controlling mental illness
- Asylums: 19th century were designed as moral and therapeutic spaces but often devolved into overcrowded custodial facilities
- Residential Care Facilities and Prisons: sites of mental health care highlights ongoing issues in managing the mentally ill within societal structures
- Total Institutions: where patients are stripped of individuality and agency
Psychiatry and Power Structures
Psychiatry has often been used as a tool to reinforce existing power structures, from colonial projects to authoritarian regimes
- Colonial psychiatry: created racialized stereotypes to justify imperial control, such as labeling colonized populations as impulsive or childlike
- Soviet Union: Psychiatry was weaponized to silence political dissent, using diagnoses like “sluggish schizophrenia” to confine dissidents
- “psychologization” of terrorism: the War on Terror reframed political and social issues as mental health concerns, often based on flawed methodologies
Control (General)
- Colonial psych
- Soviet Union
- Marginalization
- Sterilization (Eugenics)
- Total institutions
