This course offers an opportunity to explore some of the unfinished business of modern-day mental health care, using an historical lens. Mental health matters! But history matters too, because understanding the forces that have brought us to our current moment arms us with insights that potentially allow us to do better. We will focus on pressing issues in four big areas: (1) the crisis around psychiatry’s diagnostic methods, focusing especially on episodes in that story that will help us clearly see the stakes (homosexuality, PTSD, autism, and depression); (2) the changing status of drugs in mental health care: from "beat the blues" pick-me-ups, to psychotherapy aids, to medical cures for chemical imbalances, to current visions of brain rewriting through psychedelics; (3) the changing status of psychotherapy in mental health care: from the sober years of Freudian hegemony to the radical therapy movements, to the recent turn to mobile apps and chatbots; (4) changing social approaches and attitudes towards chronic mental illness, from the shuttering of the public mental hospital system to the emergence of jails and prisons as some of the largest providers of mental health care in the country; from activist efforts to challenge stigma to fears of "dangerousness."
Thursdays at 12:00-2:45 PM with Professor Anne Harrington
