Tag: psychiatry psychology
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W.H.R. Rivers and the humane treatment of shell shock
Soleil Shah London, UK A shell-shocked soldier receives electro-shock treatment from a nurse during the First World War. Image Source: Otis Historical Archives National Museum of Health and Medicine (ref Reeve 041476) via Flickr “Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity.” – Hippocrates War neurosis, or “shell shock”…
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The Montreal Experiments: Brainwashing and the ethics of psychiatric experimentation
Shaan Bhambra Montreal, Canada The Allan Memorial Institute (pictured here), where the Montreal Experiments were conducted as a part of the CIA’s MKUltra project on brainwashing, continues to serve patients of the Psychiatry Department of the Royal Victoria Hospital. Photo by chrisinphilly5448 on Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0. “We do not merely destroy our enemies;…
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The York Retreat
Beninio McDonough-Tranza London, United Kingdom Painting of the York Retreat by George Isaac Sidebottom, a patient at the retreat in the 1890s and early 1900s. Image from the retreat archives (RET/2/1/7/5), courtesy of the Welcome Collection. On 15 March 1790 Hannah Mills, a recently widowed young woman suffering from “melancholy,” was admitted to York…
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The journey into the blue
Annette Tuffs Heidelberg, Germany Alfred Doblin. Copyright S. Fischer Verlag “And when I came back – I did not return. You are never the same person you were, when you left.” Thus wrote Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) in 1946, in the newspaper Badische Zeitung in Freiburg,1 a few months after ending his forced absence of…
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The Legacy of Mercy Street Seekers
Ananya Mahapatra New Delhi, India The Sexton Family during happier times. Anne Sexton, her husband Alfred Muller Sexton II, and daughters Linda & Joy “In my dream, drilling into the marrow of my entire bone, my real dream, I’m walking up and down Beacon Hill searching for a street sign – namely MERCY STREET.…
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Six years and counting
Libanos Redda Seattle, Washington, United States The unnerving level of vigilance that anxiety patients maintain For the past six years, I have not been myself. Then again, the memory of my former self has grown a bit foggy over the years. Perhaps things were always this bad. Perhaps I have not changed much at…
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Mental health in Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic and the limits of medical positivism
Taylor Tso St. Louis, Missouri, United States The Madhouse (Casa de locos). Painting by Francisco de Goya. In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault traces the history of our present-day understanding of disease. One of the most significant and more recent problems this understanding had to confront was the pre-nineteenth century outlook that…