Selected Aspects of the History of Psychiatric Ideas and Institutions in the Past Two Hundred Years

More than any other medical discipline psychiatry has been and still is influenced by great ideas and social change. In the past 200 years psychiatry has experienced two revolutions of its system of care and an inhumane disaster. The French Revolution brought freedom and the right to treatment to the mentally ill locked away like prisoners in mad houses and insane asylums. As neither the causes of mental illnesses were known nor effective treatments available, the asylums soon resumed their old role as providers of custody and treatments that sometimes resembled torture. As a reaction to this situation German ps…