The History of Psychiatry

This chapter is devoted to ‘The History of Psychiatry’. The chapter starts with an anonymised clinical case history from the nineteenth century, drawn from the archive of the ‘Richmond District Lunatic Asylum’ (later ‘Grangegorman Mental Hospital’), a large, historic public asylum in Dublin, Ireland. This chapter explores accounts of apparent mental illness from religious texts and ancient literature, followed by a summary of the history of psychiatry as a medical discipline, including consideration of diverse treatments in the past, such as experimental surgical bacteriology, malaria therapy, insulin treatment, convulsive therapies, and lobotomy, which was the single greatest mistake in the history of psychiatry. This chapter also looks at historical critics of psychiatry in the 1960s, along with the work of psychiatrist Anthony Clare in the 1970s explaining the discipline, placing these diverse perspectives in the context of contemporary models of mental health care. Further case histories from the ‘Richmond District Lunatic Asylum’ in the early twentieth century are interspersed throughout the chapter and at the end, to illustrate relevant points.