ABSTRACT
The writing of the history of psychiatry seems to have been growing proportionally even faster than the presumed explosion of psychiatric services implied by the word ‘psychiatrization’. For Thomas Szasz, too, psychiatric institutions embody physically all that is wrong with contemporary psychiatry. His critiques of diagnosis and ‘therapy’ make polemical use of historical instances. His critiques of diagnosis and ‘therapy’ make polemical use of historical instances. For Szasz, of course, the courtroom is the site par excellence where madness is manufactured, and certainly early nineteenth-century formulations of categories like ‘moral insanity’, the monomanias, and affective disorders widened the boundaries of what counted as ‘disease’. The American legal system was heavily influenced by the English, and English legal psychiatry is beginning to be investigated historically. Many younger historians are more likely to study the history of deviance than the history of psychiatry per se.
