ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on patients diagnosed as psychopaths and ‘querulants’ in Swedish psychiatry during the 1930s and 1940s. In these decades, the concept of psychopathy was employed to specify a number of constitutional ‘abnormalities’ that hovered somewhere on the borderline between sanity and insanity. The diagnosis for querulants – paranoia querulans – on the other hand, was used to explain an excessive urge to challenge authorities, file lawsuits, or litigate that was thought to no longer be a sign of normal anger, but of mental illness. The chapter shows that the very nebulousness of these diagnoses made it difficult for patients categorised as psychopaths or querulants to be permanently released, and nigh on impossible for them to be declared sane. This was especially true of psychopaths, as the basis for their diagnosis was thought to be constitutional, and so they were not expected to get better. For working-class women diagnosed as psychopaths, notions of gender and class would often prove to be a toxic combination that would work against them in their appeals.
