1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910783670003321

Autore

Suzuki Akihito <1963->

Titolo

Madness at home [[electronic resource] ] : the psychiatrist, the patient, and the family in England, 1820-1860 / / Akihito Suzuki

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berkeley, : University of California Press, c2006

ISBN

1-282-35883-9

9786612358838

0-520-93221-8

1-59875-931-0

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (273 p.)

Collana

Medicine and society ; ; 13

Disciplina

616.89/00942/09034

Soggetti

Mentally ill - Care - England - History - 19th century

Mentally ill - Home care - England - History - 19th century

Mentally ill - England - Family relationships - History - 19th century

Mental health laws - England - History - 19th century

Psychiatry - England - History - 19th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Psychiatry in the Private and the Public Spheres -- 1. Commissions of Lunacy: Background, Sources, and Content -- 2. The Structure of Psychiatric Practice -- 3. The Problems of Liberty and Property -- 4. Managing Lunatics within the Domestic Sphere -- 5. Destabilizing the Domestic Psychiatric Regime -- 6. Public Authorities and the Ambiguities of the Lunatic at Home -- Conclusion -- Appendix: List of the Reports of Commissions of Lunacy in the London 'Times,' 1823-1861 -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

The history of psychiatric institutions and the psychiatric profession is by now familiar: asylums multiplied in nineteenth-century England and psychiatry established itself as a medical specialty around the same time. We are, however, largely ignorant about madness at home in this key period: what were the family's attitudes toward its insane member, what were patient's lives like when they remained at home? Until now, most accounts have suggested that the family and community gradually



abdicated responsibility for taking care of mentally ill members to the doctors who ran the asylums. However, this provocatively argued study, painting a fascinating picture of how families viewed and managed madness, suggests that the family actually played a critical role in caring for the insane and in the development of psychiatry itself. Akihito Suzuki's richly detailed social history includes several fascinating case histories, looks closely at little studied source material including press reports of formal legal declarations of insanity, or Commissions of Lunacy, and also provides an illuminating historical perspective on our own day and age, when the mentally ill are mainly treated in home and community.