Author Archives: Andy

Just how bad was Bedlam?  The next two podcasts in the series explore the iconic Bethlem Hospital  – what was special about Bethlem, was it typical of developing institutional provision,… Read more »

People in the past were much more familiar with many different kinds of unusual or disruptive behaviour than we are now. Asylums were rare before the nineteenth century and most… Read more »

Historic care in the community was not a substitute for something better, but a conscious choice tailored to social and economic realities, and cultural preferences.  The enduring preference for out-relief… Read more »

This podcast aims to show the part played by commercial enterprise in the care of the mentally disordered, and also how varied the responses to mental illness or impairment were… Read more »

The building of asylums did not begin in any numbers until the early nineteenth century – prior to that time, care of the mentally ill or handicapped was generally provided… Read more »

Drugs are central to the ways modern clinicians handle mental disorders, but medicines for specific conditions are a very recent innovation.  The first major breakthroughs in anti-psychotic, anti-depressant, and mood-stabilising… Read more »

On World Mental Health Day, Rab Houston reflects on how the study of the past can help us to understand mental health issues today: Some say the past is best… Read more »

In the second quarter of the twentieth century, psychiatrists were eager to try therapies, which look barbaric in hindsight and which attracted criticism even in their heyday. Such treatments including… Read more »

Physical treatments dominated sixteenth and seventeenth century mental healthcare. One important change was a greater role for psychological treatments or ‘moral therapy’ in the eighteenth-century. Moral therapy drew on the… Read more »

How have therapies for mental ailments changed over time? Today’s treatments for mental illness revolve around drugs and psychological therapy. For centuries, medical practitioners relied mainly on treating physical symptoms,… Read more »

If the nineteenth century had been mostly about physiology and somatogenic interpretations of mental problems, the early twentieth century was the golden age of psychodynamic psychiatry.   Vienna-based physician Franz Anton… Read more »

The nineteenth century in Britain belongs to materialist or somatogenic interpretations of the causes of mental problems, founded on scientific advances in physiology. Rather than mind and body, medical writers… Read more »

The theme for this section of podcasts is the shifting balance between organic or somatic causes and mental or psychological ones. As new discoveries were made, physicians, scientists, and others… Read more »

Early modern Europe saw an unprecedented craze for hunting, prosecuting, and executing witches, tens of thousands of whom were burned. It was widely believed witches could manipulate evil forces to… Read more »

This week’s podcast explores the ways in which mental illness has been identified and described. The popular, vernacular, or ‘street’ vocabulary of mental dysfunction has always been remarkably rich, perhaps… Read more »

One of the themes of these podcasts is that the boundaries between medicine and other disciplines in the past were much less clear cut than nowadays and the way knowledge… Read more »

In this block of podcasts I’m going to look again at the language used to describe mental problems, the ways lay and professional people identified them in the past, and… Read more »

This week’s podcast is about what historians do and what they can bring to an understanding of mental medicine. I talk a little about myself, set out what you might… Read more »

Welcome to the first podcast entitled Psychiatry And Its Subject. Today’s podcast outlines what makes psychiatry a distinctive medical discipline with a special image, primarily because it deals with something… Read more »

Welcome to the wordpress blog for Professor Rab Houston’s podcast series on the History of Psychiatry in Britain from 1500. The series will consist of 44 weekly podcasts which will… Read more »