MACMILLAN Preventing Mental Illness: Past, Present and Future (Mental Health in Historical Perspective)

This book provides an overview of a diverse array of preventive strategies relating to mental illness, and identifies their achievements and shortcomings. The chapters in this collection illustrate how researchers, clinicians and policy makers drew inspiration from divergent fields of knowledge and practice: from eugenics, genetics and medication to mental hygiene, child guidance, social welfare, public health and education; from risk management to radical and social psychiatry, architectural design and environmental psychology. It highlights the shifting patterns of biological, social and psychodynamic models, while adopting a gender perspective and considering professional developments as well as changing social and legal contexts, including deinstitutionalisation and social movements. Through vigorous research, the contributors demonstrate that preventive approaches to mental health have a long history, and point to the conclusion that it might well be possible to learn from such historical attempts. The book also explores which of these approaches are worth considering in future and which are best confined to the past. Within this context, the book aims at stoking and informing debate and conversation about how to prevent mental illness and improve mental health in the years to come. Chapters 3, 10, and 12 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com Review “This engaging volume will be of interest to historians, interdisciplinary health researchers, policymakers, and mental health professionals alike ―all who would benefit from learning about the seldom heard lessons of past endeavors. This important work will help to redress the gap in the historiography of preventive approaches to mental health that has largely been overlooked.” (Verusca Calabria, H-Net Reviews Humanities and Social Sciences, networks.h-net.org, October, 2020) From the Back Cover This book provides an overview of a diverse array of preventive strategies relating to mental illness, and identifies their achievements and shortcomings. The chapters in this collection illustrate how researchers, clinicians and policy makers drew inspiration from divergent fields of knowledge and practice: from eugenics, genetics and medication to mental hygiene, child guidance, social welfare, public health and education; from risk management to radical and social psychiatry, architectural design and environmental psychology. It highlights the shifting patterns of biological, social and psychodynamic models, while adopting a gender perspective and considering professional developments as well as changing social and legal contexts, including deinstitutionalisation and social movements. Through vigorous research, the contributors demonstrate that preventive approaches to mental health have a long history, and point to the conclusion that it might well be possible to learn from such historical attempts. The book also explores which of these approaches are worth considering in future and which are best confined to the past. Within this context, the book aims at stoking and informing debate and conversation about how to prevent mental illness and improve mental health in the years to come.  Chapters 3, 10, and 12 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com About the Author Despo Kritsotaki is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Crete, Greece.     Vicky Long is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century British History at Newcastle University, UK.  Matthew Smith is Professor of Health History at the University of Strathclyde, UK.