Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: psychiatry psychology

  • 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”…

  • 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;…

  • “I’m really bad with numbers”: Using the mini mental status examination among farm workers in rural California

    Bernardo Ng Imperial County, California, United States   César Chávez visitas colegio César Chávez en 1974. Movimiento. 1974. In 1975, Dr. Marshal F. Folstein and his colleagues at Tufts University published the seminal paper “Mini-mental state. A practical method for grading the cognitive state of patients for the clinician.”1 Since then, this test has been…

  • Of men and brains and rats

    Observers of the affairs of man in an age of mass destruction weaponry have long worried about the future of the human race. Why do men so often make erroneous decisions and act in ways detrimental to their interests and even to their survival? Is not Homo sapiens the epitome of millions of years of…

  • No laughing matter

    Shafiqah Samarasam Subang Jaya, Malaysia   Portrait of Robin Williams. Creative Commons. “You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.” These were the words of Robin Williams, the man whose own laughter was enough to make us laugh. In a world where tragedy occurs every day, his words helped us to…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • 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…