Social Order/Mental Disorder represents a provocative and exciting exploration of social response to madness in England and the United States from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Scull, who is well-known for his previous work in this area, examines a range of issues, including the changing social meanings of madness and the emergence and consolidation of the psychiatric profession. This book is emphatically not part of the venerable tradition of hagiography that has celebrated psychiatric history as a long struggle toward humane treatments for the mentally ill.
Key Features
- Explores the changing social meanings of madness.
- Examines the emergence and consolidation of the psychiatric profession.
- Discusses the troubled relationship between psychiatry and the law.
- Investigates the linkages between sex and madness.
- Analyzes the constitution, character, and collapse of the asylum system.
Additional Information
Scull contends that traditional mental hospitals, for much of their existence, resembled cemeteries for the still breathing, with medical hubris at times serving to license dangerous, mutilating, even life-threatening experiments on the dead souls confined therein. He argues that only the sociologically blind would deny that psychiatrists are deeply involved in the definition and identification of what constitutes madness in our world. Claims that mental illness is a purely naturalistic category, devoid of contamination by the social, are taken to be patently absurd. However, the commitment to examine psychiatry and its ministrations with a critical eye by no means entails the romantic idea that the problems it deals with are purely the invention of the professional mind, or the Manichean notion that all psychiatric interventions are malevolent and ill-conceived. It is the task of unromantic criticism that is attempted in this book.
