ABSTRACT
This introduction covers the keys concepts relevant to the discussion of madness and its history in this book. The book first gives an overview of madness from ancient times to the Age of the Enlightenment. It then focuses on the great transformation in the management of madness in the nineteenth century. The focus then shifts to the multifarious ways in which the mentally ill have been treated and mistreated by their physicians and other caretakers from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century, including hypnotism, psychoanalysis and psychosurgery. In addition, it investigates the more sinister developments during the Cold War era, including the CIA's mind control programme and political psychiatry in the Soviet Union. Finally, the book explores developments since the 1960s, focusing on anti-psychiatry and its legacy, the revival of biological psychiatry and the late twentieth-century 'deinstitutionalization' of mental health care.
