Andrew T. Scull's Books

Social Order/Mental Disorder

Anglo-American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective

By: Andrew Scull

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Social Order/Mental Disorder

Anglo-American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective

By: Andrew Scull

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, the emergence and consolidation of the psychiatric profession, the often troubled relationship between psychiatry and the law, the linkages between sex and madness, and the constitution, character, and collapse of the asylum as our standard response to the problems posed by mental disorder. This book is emphatically not part of the venerable tradition of hagiography that has celebrated psychiatric history as a long struggle in which the steady application of rational-scientific principles has produced irregular but unmistakable evidence of progress toward humane treatments for the mentally ill. In fact, Scull contends that traditional mental hospitals, for much of their existence, resembled cemeteries for the still breathing, medical hubris having at times served 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 – hence, claims that mental illness is a purely naturalistic category, somehow devoid of contamination by the social, are taken to be patently absurd. Scull points out, however, that 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.

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Page Count

567

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

0429850360

ISBN 13

9780429850363

Decarceration

Community Treatment and the Deviant - A Radical View

By: Andrew T. Scull

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Decarceration

Community Treatment and the Deviant - A Radical View

By: Andrew T. Scull

Decarceration" is a word which has not yet entered the dictionary. But it is increasingly being used to designate a process with momentous implications for all of us. It is shorthand for a state-sponsored policy of closing down asylums, prisons, and reformatories. Mad people, criminals, and delinquents are being discharged or refused admission to the dumps in which they have been traditionally housed. Instead, they are to be left at large, to be coped with "in the community." We are told by those who run programs of this sort that keeping the criminal and the mentally disturbed in our midst is "humane." We are informed that it is a "more effective" means of curing or rehabilitating such people. And, miracle of miracles, we learn that this approach is also "cheaper"! With an alternative which embraces such an array of virtues, who can be surprised to learn that mental hospitals are emptying faster and faster, and that with each passing day the convicted felon's chances of going to prison grow more remote? On closer examination, it turns out that this whole enterprise is built on a foundation of sand. The claim that leaving deviants at large "cures" or "rehabilitates" them is just that - a claim. Little or no solid evidence can be offered in its support. Instead, it rests uneasily on a cloud of rhetoric and wishful thinking. Most people's conception of the "humane" does not embrace placing senile men and women in the hands of rapacious nursing home operators or turning loose the perpetrators of violent crimes, under conditions which guarantee that they will receive little or no supervision. Yet, as decarceration has been implemented, this is what has been happening. Much of the time, it appears as if the policy makers simply do not know what will happen when their schemes are put into effect. Nor do they seem very concerned to find out. Often, they do not even know where those they have dumped back on the rest of us are to be found.

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Page Count

194

Publisher

John Wiley & Sons

Published Date

ISBN 10

0745697240

ISBN 13

9780745697246

Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen

The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era

By: Andrew Scull

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Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen

The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era

By: Andrew Scull

The Victorian Age saw the transformation of the madhouse into the asylum into the mental hospital; of the mad-doctor into the alienist into the psychiatrist; and of the madman (and madwoman) into the mental patient. In Andrew Scull's edited collection Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen, contributors' essays offer a historical analysis of the issues that continue to plague the psychiatric profession today. Topics covered include the debate over the effectiveness of institutional or community treatment, the boundary between insanity and criminal responsibility, the implementation of commitment laws, and the differences in defining and treating mental illness based on the gender of the patient.

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Page Count

401

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812211197

ISBN 13

9780812211191

The Most Solitary of Afflictions

Madness and Society in Britain, 1700-1900

By: Andrew Scull

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The Most Solitary of Afflictions

Madness and Society in Britain, 1700-1900

By: Andrew Scull

Andrew Scull studies the evolution of the treatment of lunacy in England, tracing transformations in social practices & beliefs, the development of institutional management of the mad, & exposing the contrasts between the expectations of asylum founders & the harsh realities of institutional life. Originally published: 1993.

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Page Count

470

Publisher

Yale University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0300107544

ISBN 13

9780300107548

Social Order/Mental Disorder

Anglo-American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective

By: Andrew Scull

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Social Order/Mental Disorder

Anglo-American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective

By: Andrew Scull

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N/A

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

567

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

0429850360

ISBN 13

9780429850363

Book's by Andrew T. Scull

Social Order/Mental Disorder

Social Order/Mental Disorder

Decarceration

Decarceration

Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen

Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen

The Most Solitary of Afflictions

The Most Solitary of Afflictions

Social Order/Mental Disorder

Social Order/Mental Disorder

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