The Spanish Flu Pandemic and Mental Health: A Historical Perspective
April 3, 2020
Have we learned anything? Looking back at the Spanish flu epidemic as the world deals with the COVID pandemic.
Greg Eghigian, PhD
The Legacy of Political Persecution
February 11, 2020
As historians and mental health professionals both know, in the words of the writer William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Before Personality: Character Assessment and Its Troubled History
August 26, 2019
The 20th century introduced a number of new concepts to psychiatry and clinical psychology. One of the most influential has been the notion of personality.
Five Trends in Historical Research on Psychiatry and Mental Health
December 4, 2018
An assessment of what has been accomplished, how the field is changing, and new directions for scholarship as we forge ahead into the next year.
A “Sickness of Our Time”: How Suicide First Became a Research Question
April 27, 2018
In 1897, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) published Le suicide: Étude de sociologie [Suicide: A Study in Sociology]. With it, Durkheim largely succeeded in achieving one of his main goals.
5 New Books in the History of Psychiatry to Read for 2018
December 19, 2017
A selection of noteworthy books to add to your reading list. Can you think of others?
ECT: History of a Psychiatric Controversy
June 23, 2017
The author interviews Jonathan Sadowsky, PhD, historian of psychiatry, about his book Electroconvulsive Therapy in America: The Anatomy of a Medical Controversy.
The Holiday Syndrome: Who Exactly Came Up With the Idea of Those Christmas Blues?
December 5, 2016
Since ancient times, doctors have shown a good deal of interest in identifying seasonal patterns in the incidence of symptoms and disease. Could the holiday blues be a myth?
A Methamphetamine Dictatorship? Hitler, Nazi Germany, and Drug Abuse
June 23, 2016
What do we know about the health and drug consumption habits of the Nazi leader of the German people from 1933 to 1945?
Madness, Psychiatry, and the Visual Arts in History
February 6, 2016
While much in the history of “madness” has changed over the course of time, one of the most consistent—yet sometimes overlooked—features of that history has been the presence of the visual arts.
