Topics in the History of Medicine: History of Mental Therapeutics

The focus of this topics course is the history of mental therapeutics - how medical practitioners, laypersons, and researchers have attempted to treat mental illness, through the long twentieth-century, through various means. The readings touch on psychiatric institutions, Freud and psychoanalysis, somatic treatments, the psychopharmacological revolution, anti psychiatry, and neuro-enhancement, amongst others. Exploring the treatment of mental illness in key historical moments in the history of psychiatry, will help us understand its force, then and today.