By Mab Segrest (NHC Fellow, 2017–18) Today, 90 percent of psychiatric beds are located in jails and prisons across the United States, institutions that confine disproportionate numbers of African Americans. After more than a decade of research, the celebrated scholar and activist Mab Segrest locates the deep historical roots of this startling fact, turning her … Continued
By Allen R. Dyer (NHC Fellow, 1981–82) Ethical questions lie at the heart of all psychiatric dilemmas. Ethics and Psychiatry examines the day-to-day issues affecting medical ethics, such as confidentiality, informed con-sent and moral perfection. The book focuses on the ethics of professional advertising; examines the importance of privacy of the doctor-patient relationship, and illustrates … Continued
By Jan Goldstein (NHC Fellow, 2006–07) Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy offers a rare window into the inner life of a person ordinarily inaccessible to historians: a semiliterate peasant girl who lived almost two centuries ago, in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Eighteen-year-old Nanette Leroux fell ill in 1822 with a variety of incapacitating nervous symptoms. … Continued
By Martin Summers (NHC Fellow, 2013–14) From the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, Saint Elizabeths Hospital was one of the United States' most important institutions for the care and treatment of the mentally ill. Founded in 1855 to treat insane soldiers and sailors as well as civilian residents in the nation's capital, the institution … Continued
Edited by Michael MacDonald (NHC Fellow, 1990–91) Witchcraft was at its height in Elizabethan London. Edward Jorden showed that hysteria and not demons lay behind the witch-craze. Edward Jorden's Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603) is said to have reclaimed the demoniacally possessed for medicine and to have introduced the concept … Continued
Martin Summers argues that assumptions about the existence of distinctive black and white psyches shaped the therapeutic and diagnostic regimes in Saint Elizabeths hospital and left a legacy of poor treatment of African American patients, even after psychiatrists had begun to reject racialist conceptions of the psyche. Yet black patients and their communities asserted their own agency and exhibited a “rights consciousness” in large and small ways, from agitating for more equal treatment to attempting to manage the therapeutic experience.