Please be advised these podcasts contain language, which may cause offence, and descriptions of medical procedures and experiences, which some listeners may find upsetting.
1. What can history teach us about psychiatry?
1.1 Psychiatry and its subject
1.2 An historian’s approach to psychiatry: the aims of the series
2. How were mental problems identified and described in the past?
2.1 Melancholy and mania: the main classifications
2.3 Describing and identifying mental problems: lay and legal language
2.4 Madness, witchcraft, and religion
3. How have ideas about the causes of mental problems changed over time?
4. How have therapies for mental ailments changed over time?
4.1 Holistic and ‘heroic’ remedies
4.2 ‘Moral therapy’ and the origins of psychological treatment
4.3 Surgery and early drug treatments
4.4 The pharmacological revolution
5. Where were the mentally troubled looked after before there were public asylums?
5.1 Domestic care and parish poor relief
5.3 Domestic or institutional options
5.4 The familiarity of madness
6. How bad was Bedlam (Bethlem Hospital)?
6.1 Bedlam part 1: a corrupt freak show?
6.2 Bedlam part 2: cruelty or cure?
7, How do we account for the rise and decline of asylums?
7.3 Changing attitudes to asylums
7.4 Foucault and anti-psychiatry
8. What were the origins of the psychiatric profession?
8.2 Medical practitioners and practice in the past
9. What was the relationship between psychiatry and the law?
9.1 Crime and the insanity defence
9.2 Civil law and mental incapacity
9.3 Doctor and patient: anti-psychiatry revisited
10. How has psychiatry been portrayed in mass media?
10.2 Newspapers and printed images
11. How was suicide understood in the past?
11.2 Patterns of suicide in the past: some surprises
11.3 The mind of the suicide and the attitudes of relatives and friends
12. Has the incidence of mental illness changed over time?
12.1 New diagnoses or new ailments?
12.2 Changes in science and society
13, Reprise: the lessons of history