Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Tables and Figures
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Indianisation and its Discontents
- Chapter 2 The Patients: The Demographics of Gender and Age, Locality, Occupation, Caste and Religion
- Chapter 3 Institutional Trends and Standardisation: Deaths, Diseases and Cures
- Chapter 4 Classifications, Types of Disorder and Aetiology
- Chapter 5 Treatments
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 4 - Classifications, Types of Disorder and Aetiology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Tables and Figures
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Indianisation and its Discontents
- Chapter 2 The Patients: The Demographics of Gender and Age, Locality, Occupation, Caste and Religion
- Chapter 3 Institutional Trends and Standardisation: Deaths, Diseases and Cures
- Chapter 4 Classifications, Types of Disorder and Aetiology
- Chapter 5 Treatments
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The word is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.
—Martin Heidegger, 1947The ambition to standardise the classification of different types of mental illness and to develop more sophisticated diagnostic categories during the early twentieth century has been well documented. The traditional nineteenth-century mode of diagnostics, with mania, melancholia, idiocy and dementia at its core, was, as historians of psychiatry have shown, reshaped by the adoption of more refined systems throughout the world during the early twentieth century. This general trend seems well established. What is less clear is how this process towards modern classification systems and standardisation manifested itself on the ground, in diagnostic practice in individual institutions. Historians have traced the varied conceptual developments of the main figures driving this process such as Bleuler, Kraepelin, Meyer and Leonhard. But the ways in which changes in nomenclature induced and mapped on to conceptual changes in less prominent, individual psychiatrists' cognitive mind-sets and diagnostic practices have scarcely been considered.
Even institutional reports and statistics have not been evaluated to any great extent. With the exception of works by Andrews et al. (1997), Cherry (2003) Crammer (1990), Gardner (1999), Gittins (1998) and Michael (2003), the number of institutional histories of Britain with which case-studies from other localities could be compared is indeed restricted.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Colonialism and Transnational PsychiatryThe Development of an Indian Mental Hospital in British India, c. 1925-1940, pp. 105 - 172Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2013