ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the central arguments and themes of Making Mental Health: A Critical History by emphasising the political entanglements of mental health since the professionalisation of psychiatry in the mid-nineteenth century. It pays particular attention to the shift in terminology from ‘mental hygiene’ to ‘mental health’ during the first half of the twentieth century, as well as to three key concerns in the history of psychiatry: the role of institutions, the status of patients, and the problem of psychiatric classification. Finally, it introduces the reader to the six themes that structure the book: the rise and fall of the asylum (though not custodial care itself), the search for effective treatments, the increase in states’ interests in psychiatry and mental health from the interwar period onwards, the attempts to universalise or globalise mental health, critiques of diagnostic categories and clinical practice on sociopolitical grounds, and, lastly, the relationship between psychiatry, mental health, and capitalism.
