Social Order/Mental Disorder represents a provocative and exciting
exploration of social response to madness in England and the United
States from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Scull,
who is well-known for his previous work in this area, examines a
range of issues, including the changing social meanings of madness,
the emergence and consolidation of the psychiatric profession, the
often troubled relationship between psychiatry and the law, the
linkages between sex and madness, and the constitution, character,
and collapse of the asylum as our standard response to the problems
posed by mental disorder. This book is emphatically not part of the
venerable tradition of hagiography that has celebrated psychiatric
history as a long struggle in which the steady application of
rational-scientific principles has produced irregular but
unmistakable evidence of progress toward humane treatments for the
mentally ill. In fact, Scull contends that traditional mental
hospitals, for much of their existence, resembled cemeteries for
the still breathing, medical hubris having at times served to
license dangerous, mutilating, even life-threatening experiments on
the dead souls confined therein. He argues that only the
sociologically blind would deny that psychiatrists are deeply
involved in the definition and identification of what constitutes
madness in our world - hence, claims that mental illness is a
purely naturalistic category, somehow devoid of contamination by
the social, are taken to be patently absurd. Scull points out,
however, that the commitment to examine psychiatry and its
ministrations with a critical eye by no means entails the romantic
idea that the problems it deals with are purely the invention of
the professional mind, or the Manichean notion that all psychiatric
interventions are malevolent and ill-conceived. It is the task of
unromantic criticism that is attempted in this book.
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