Grappling with Mental Illness Psychiatry and the Social Sciences

An exploration of psychiatry's attempt to monopolize the field of mental illness from the end of World War II to the present day

Mental illness, as the eminent historian of psychiatry Michael MacDonald once remarked, is "the most solitary of afflictions to the people who experience it; but it is the most social of maladies to those who observe its effects." The most serious forms of mental disturbance present an extraordinary challenge to those who seek to treat it, while at the same time mental illness imposes immense costs--both material and non-material--on individual sufferers, their immediate social circle, and society at large. For more than two centuries, efforts to cope with and cure mental maladies have been entrusted to a segment of the medical profession that began to organize itself as a separate specialism in the 1840s--which by the end of the nineteenth century came to be known as psychiatry.

In Grappling with Mental Illness, Andrew Scull explores psychiatry's attempt to monopolize the field of mental illness from the end of World War II to the present day, as well as its interactions with four major social sciences: psychology, sociology, anthropology, and economics, each of which presented its own challenges to psychiatry's presumed pre-eminence. Covering psychiatry's influence on psychology's engagement with clinical issues, its often-contentious relationship with sociology, its initial fascination with Freudian psychoanalysis that it shared with anthropology, and its intellectual differences with economics, Grappling with Mental Illness offers a fresh perspective on the issue of mental illness, and society's ongoing efforts to find a cure for this solitary, as well as social, problem.