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Pietikainen Petteri , Madness: A History (Milton Park , Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 346, £29.00, paperback, ISBN: 978-0-415-71318-4.
Scull Andrew , Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine (Princeton, NJ and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press , 2015), pp. 448, $24.95, paperback, ISBN: 978-0-691-16615-5, Colour plate illustrations.
Book Review
Two new scholarly works, both with ambitions to provide a full historical account of 'madness' - from the ancient world to the late twentieth century - appeared in 2015. Both authors argue that 'madness' is a term that is far more encompassing than mental illness, and one more historically accurate than, for example, 'insanity' over the longer term. Madness is witnessed, glimpsed and observed in both books on a large canvas and in myriad ways. Perhaps because of their scope, both histories tend to fall into a received pattern of inquiry, with the narrative trajectories of the two books being very similar in their story arc: from accounts of madness and lunacy before the 'great confinement', the era of the asylum and madhouse, through to the modern age of medicine and institutions; and, later, wartime environments for medical experimentation, post-war medicine and mental illness, right through to critical accounts of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) and the pharmacological revolution. Ultimately, these books and their authors place the history of madness and mental illness and its treatments firmly inside a 'medical history' literature. And yet the major contribution of these texts lies in their sociocultural analyses of 'madness'. What was madness, in medicine and in cultures, is the major theme addressed by both Pietikainen and Scull.
If histories are always produced from the present, as Foucault argued, then the worry we have over mental illness in our own times certainly informs the production of these histories. We are now seeing an array of aspects of this Western society crisis: with rising rates of mental illness; the increased visibility of 'madness' in public due to homelessness and addiction; anxiety over medical treatments and the efficacy of mental health public policy; debates about the efficacy of drug regimes; and issues of advocacy for 'service users' or those with lived experiences of mental...