Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Anne E. Parsons
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Health Policy ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
First Century ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Carceral State ◽  
Mental Hospitals ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Terms

The introduction reviews the relevant histories of prisons, mental health policy, and the social welfare state. It highlights how recent scholarship has not connected the history of mental hospitals to the broader history of imprisonment. From Asylum to Prison frames historic mental hospitals as part of a broader carceral state and charts how the rise of mass incarceration shaped the closure of mental hospitals. Law and order politics served to criminalize mental health conditions and substance abuse. New prison construction in the 1980s took money away from mental health services and prisons absorbed many functions of the former mental health system. Finally, this history of deinstitutionalization offers lesson for people working to reduce mass incarceration in the twenty-first century United States. The introduction closes with a discussion of people-centered language and key terms such as institutions, carceral state, and mental illness.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
pp. 151-156
Author(s):  
Anne E. Parsons
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Past History ◽  
Mental Health Policy ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mass Scale ◽  
Prison Reform ◽  
Cost Cutting ◽  
Substance Abuse Disorders ◽  
History Of

The epilogue reflects on the contemporary crisis of mass incarceration in the United States, which has particularly affected people with mental health conditions and substance abuse disorders. It argues that today’s crisis is deeply rooted in the past history of mental health policy and offers a few main lessons for people working to make change. First, restrictive environments such as prisons and mental hospitals are inappropriate places to hold people on a mass scale. Second, it cautions people who are working to decarcerate prisons today. The history of deinstitutionalization proved that that cost-cutting cannot be the main reason for change, as it led to inadequate resources. People invested in prison reform should also be cautious that decarceration does not lead to new forms of restrictive environments, which happened during deinstitutionalization.

scholarly journals The History of Mental Health Services in Modern England: Practitioner Memories and the Direction of Future Research

2015 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 599-624 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Turner ◽  
Rhodri Hayward ◽  
Katherine Angel ◽  
Bill Fulford ◽  
John Hall ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Health Policy ◽  
Mental Health Services ◽  
Health Services ◽  
Mental Health Policy ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

Writing the recent history of mental health services requires a conscious departure from the historiographical tropes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which have emphasised the experience of those identified (and legally defined) as lunatics and the social, cultural, political, medical and institutional context of their treatment. A historical narrative structured around rights (to health and liberty) is now complicated by the rise of new organising categories such as ‘costs’, ‘risks’, ‘needs’ and ‘values’. This paper, drawing on insights from a series of witness seminars attended by historians, clinicians and policymakers, proposes a programme of research to place modern mental health services in England and Wales in a richer historical context. Historians should recognise the fragmentation of the concepts of mental illness and mental health need, acknowledge the relationship between critiques of psychiatry and developments in other intellectual spheres, place the experience of the service user in the context of wider socio-economic and political change, understand the impacts of the social perception of ‘risk’ and of moral panic on mental health policy, relate the politics of mental health policy and resources to the general determinants of institutional change in British central and local government, and explore the sociological and institutional complexity of the evolving mental health professions and their relationships with each other and with their clients. While this is no small challenge, it is perhaps the only way to avoid the perpetuation of ‘single-issue mythologies’ in describing and accounting for change.

The Property Species

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart J. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Fundamental Principle ◽  
First Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Symbolic Thought ◽  
Core Property ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

What is property, and why does our species happen to have it? The Property Species explores how Homo sapiens acquires, perceives, and knows the custom of property, and why it might be relevant for understanding how property works in the twenty-first century. Arguing from some hard-to-dispute facts that neither the natural sciences nor the humanities—nor the social sciences squarely in the middle—are synthesizing a full account of property, this book offers a cross-disciplinary compromise that is sure to be controversial: All human beings and only human beings have property in things, and at its core, property rests on custom, not rights. Such an alternative to conventional thinking contends that the origins of property lie not in food, mates, territory, or land, but in the very human act of creating, with symbolic thought, something new that did not previously exist. Integrating cognitive linguistics with the philosophy of property and a fresh look at property disputes in the common law, this book makes the case that symbolic-thinking humans locate the meaning of property within a thing. The provocative implications are that property—not property rights—is an inherent fundamental principle of economics, and that legal realists and the bundle-of-sticks metaphor are wrong about the facts regarding property. Written by an economist who marvels at the natural history of humankind, the book is essential reading for experts and any reader who has wondered why people claim things as “Mine!,” and what that means for our humanity.

scholarly journals Palaeohispanic Languages and Epigraphies

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multidisciplinary Perspective ◽  
Do So

At least four writing systems—in addition to the Phoenician, Greek, and Latin ones—were used between the fifth century BCE and the first century CE to write the indigenous languages of the Iberian peninsula (the so-called Palaeohispanic languages): Tartessian, Iberian, Celtiberian, and Lusitanian. In total over three thousand inscriptions are preserved in what is certainly the largest corpus of epigraphic expression in the western Mediterranean world with the exception of the Italian peninsula. The aim of this book is to present a state of the question that includes the latest cutting-edge scholarship on these epigraphies and the languages that they transmit. To do so, the editors have put together a volume that from a multidisciplinary perspective brings together linguistic, philological, epigraphic, numismatic, historical, and archaeological aspects of the surviving inscriptions. The study of these languages is essential to achieve a better understanding of the social, economic, and cultural history of Hispania and the ancient western Mediterranean. They are also the key to our understanding of colonial Phoenician and Greek literacy, which lies at the root of the spread of these languages and also of the diffusion of Roman literacy, which played an important role in the final expansion of the so-called Palaeohispanic languages.

The History of Unreason

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Samuel Teague ◽  
Peter Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Mentally Ill ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Individual Responsibility ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
Health And Illness ◽  
History Of

This chapter reflects on the importance of the historical narrative of mental illness, arguing that Western countries have sought new ways to confine the mentally ill in the post-asylum era, namely through the effects of stigma and medicalization. The walls are invisible, when once they were physical. The chapter outlines how health and illness can be understood as socially constructed illustrating how mental health has been constructed uniquely across cultures and over time. To understand this process more fully, it is necessary to consider the history of madness, a story of numerous social flashpoints. The trajectories of two primary mental health narratives are charted in this chapter. The authors argue that these narratives have played, and continue to play, an important role in the social construction of mental illness. These narratives are “confinement” and “individual responsibility.” Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Roy Porter, the authors describe how Western culture has come to consider the mentally ill as a distinct, abnormal other.

Provincializing memory studies: Polish approaches in the past and present

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 391-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kornelia Kończal ◽  
Joanna Wawrzyniak
Keyword(s):  
Memory Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Past ◽  
Research Perspectives ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Terms

The history of memory studies has usually been told through research perspectives advanced in France, Germany and the United States. This well-established cartography and, thus, chronology of the field can be challenged while taking into account other provinces of thought. The example of Polish sociology and history shows that the Western memory boom took off just at the time when the golden age of the biographical method reached its apex in Poland and most research on historical consciousness had already been carried out. Furthermore, the Polish case illustrates how since 1989 researchers have been abandoning key terms previously used in the social sciences and humanities in favour of terminology related to memory. On the whole, the article argues for the exploration of continuities, ruptures and transformations of categories developed in non-mainstream research traditions to question the beaten tracks of the history of ideas.

The Roman Garden

1950 ◽  
Vol 19 (57) ◽  
pp. 97-105
Author(s):  
James Lawson
Keyword(s):  
Private Life ◽  
First Century ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Social Habits ◽  
Almost All

Aman's character is judged not merely by his public services and his political views but also by his private life and individual interests. Similarly the history of a nation is to be read not only in its military exploits, its constitutional experiments, its art and literature, but also in the social habits and predominant interests of its citizens. Just as a garden mirrors the character of its owner, so the gardens of a nation reflect the character and the degree of advancement of the State. It is no coincidence that the popular garden of the Roman Republic was the simple kitchen garden, while under the Empire pretentious landscape gardens were the vogue. The vitalizing energy of the Republic found an outlet in the productive vegetable plot: the elaborate but sterile gardens of the Empire were symbolic of incipient decay.Until the first century b.c. almost all Roman gardens were cottage gardens. Their plan and culture were governed solely by practical needs. From them the mistress of the house used to replenish her larder and medicine-chest and adorn the family shrine with flowers. Pliny the Elder reminds the luxury-seeking populace of a later date that in the past at Rome a garden was the poor man's estate: it was the only market he had from which to provide himself with food. The prime function of a garden was to make its owner self-sufficient. This self-sufficiency was more easy of attainment in ancient Italy than in more northerly countries, for the diet of the Romans consisted, for the most part, of salads.

Judeans in Sippar and Susa during the First Century of the Babylonian Exile: Assimilation and Perseverance under Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid Rule

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yigal Bloch
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Well Being ◽  
First Century ◽  
Single Family ◽  
Achaemenid Empire ◽  
Personal Names ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

AbstractThe present study discusses the attestations of persons of Judean origin in Neo-Babylonian cuneiform tablets (of the period between 550 and 490 bce) as possible evidence of some aspects of the social history of the community of Judeans exiled to Babylonia by Nebuchadnezzar II. Although the number of such attestations is very small, it is nonetheless possible to single out two groups which display different patterns of personal name giving across generations. In one instance, a group of merchants in the city of Sippar (belonging mostly to a single family) uses, in part, distinctly Judean personal names in the first generation of the exile, but abandons them completely in favor of Babylonian theophoric names in the next generation. In another instance, a group of individuals active mostly in Susa and probably belonging to the families of royal officials (as suggested by names and patronymics of the type of Beamtennamen – names expressing a pious wish for the well-being of the king) displays the use of Yahwistic personal names even though the fathers of those individuals bore Babylonian theophoric names. It is suggested that the persistence of Yahwistic – hence distinctly Judean – names among royal officials or their direct offspring, even after the previous generation bore Babylonian names, reflects a considerable measure of tolerance toward ethnically foreign elements in the royal administration (the relevant examples date from the period after the establishment of the Achaemenid empire). In contrast, the progressing adoption of Babylonian names among the Judean merchants in Sippar in the first half of the sixth century bce seems likely to reflect assimilation into the native Babylonian society, fostered by the necessity to pursue commercial dealings with the Ebabbar temple of Šamaš and the social circles centered around the temple, which consisted of conservatively minded upper strata of the native Babylonian society. Editions of the cuneiform tablets discussed in the present study are provided in the Appendix.

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