In this classic of French cultural studies, Georges Didi-Huberman traces the intimate and reciprocal relationship between the disciplines of psychiatry and photography in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the immense photographic output of the Salpetriere hospital, the notorious Parisian asylum for insane and incurable women, Didi-Huberman shows the crucial role played by photography in the invention of the category of hysteria. Under the direction of the medical teacher and clinician Jean-Martin Charcot, the inmates of Salpetriere identified as hysterics were methodically photographed, providing skeptical colleagues with visual proof of hysteria's specific form. These images, many of which appear in this book, provided the materials for the multivolume album Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere. As Didi-Huberman shows, these photographs were far from simply objective documentation. The subjects were required to portray their hysterical "type" -- they performed their own hysteria. Bribed by the special status they enjoyed in the purgatory of experimentation and threatened with transfer back to the inferno of the incurables, the women patiently posed for the photographs and submitted to presentations of hysterical attacks before the crowds that gathered for Charcot's "Tuesday Lectures." Charcot did not stop at voyeuristic observation. Through techniques such as hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and genital manipulation, he instigated the hysterical symptoms in his patients, eventually giving rise to hatred and resistance on their part. Didi-Huberman follows this path from complicity to antipathy in one of Charcot's favorite "cases," that of Augustine, whose image crops up again and again in the Iconographie. Augustine's virtuosic performance of hysteria ultimately became one of self-sacrifice, seen in pictures of ecstasy, crucifixion, and silent cries.

La pratique de l'esprit humain : l'institution asilaire et la révolution démocratique

Invention of hysteria : Charcot and the photographic iconography of the Salpêtrière

Nurses in psychiatric settings have an important role to play in the application of seclusion, a measure that continues to be a frequently used intervention for the management of disturbing patient behaviours. Albeit a controversial measure, isolating patients remains a common institutional practice that has received widespread attention from a political, ethical, legal, and clinical standpoint. Although there is an abundance of scientific work on the subject, few studies have examined the experience of patients being confined. In order to improve the quality of nursing care surrounding this measure it appeared essential to obtain data on patients' perspectives, information deemed valuable in orienting nursing interventions. This qualitative study, guided by a phenomenological research design, aimed at describing and gaining a better understanding of patients with a severe and persistent psychiatric disorder who were placed in a seclusion room while hospitalized on a closed psychiatric unit. Using a semi-structured, non-directive interview format, a total of six patients participated in this study. Content analysis of participants' narratives yielded three main themes that appeared to be central to their experience of seclusion: their experience of seclusion on an emotional level, their perception of this intervention, and how they coped during their stay in the seclusion room. Major findings emerging from this nursing study centred on the following dimensions: patients' perceptions of seclusion as a punitive measure and a modality for social control and, the experience of seclusion serving as an intensification of already existing feelings of exclusion, rejection, abandonment, and isolation. In addition the findings also suggest that it is not seclusion per se that impacts on their negative perception and negative emotional experience but rather the lack of nurse-patient contact during the seclusion experience. Furthermore, whether patients coped by regressing, acting out, or taking on a more compliant stance, they appeared to be motivated by a need to connect with staff. This points to the importance of the relational aspects of nursing care when applying this restrictive measure. A need for modifying the institutional culture surrounding seclusion and transforming nursing practices are discussed as are future research endeavours.

background

The mentally ill and social exclusion: a critical examination of the use of seclusion from the patient's perspective

One of the assumptions made when mental problems are defined as a medical problem is that certain problems, certain diagnoses, are chronic. Nevertheless, a substantial number of follow-up studies h ...

/pdf/managing-the-contradictions-recovery-from-severe-mental-1x4qck5uid.pdf

Managing the contradictions : Recovery from severe mental disorders

ix INTRODUCTION 1 Escaping the Straightjacket of Confinement: The History of TwentiethCentury Psychiatry 10 Histories of the Asylum 10 Deinstitutionalization 12 Between Shell Shock and “Euthanasia” 14 The Fluid Boundaries of Disciplines 19 Perspectives on Psychiatry, Society, and Politics 23 Non-Political Politics, Science, and Society 23 Psycho-Politics 27 CHAPTER I – DIAGNOSING THE REVOLUTION 35 Introduction 35 The Revolutionary Psychopaths 41 A National Nervous Breakdown 50 Psychiatric Expertise in the Interwar Period 64 CHAPTER II – APPLYING PSYCHIATRY IN INTERWAR VIENNA 7

Curing the soul of the nation: psychiatry, society, and psycho-politics in the German-speaking countries, 1918-1939

This paper provides an interpretation, based on the social systems theory of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, of the recent paradigmatic shift of mental health care from an asylum-based model to a community-oriented network of services. The observed shift is described as the development of psychiatry as a function system of modern society and whose operative goal has moved from the medical and social management of a lower and marginalized group to the specialized medical and psychological care of the whole population. From this theoretical viewpoint, the wider deployment of the modern social order as a functionally differentiated system may be considered to be a consistent driving force for this process; it has made asylum psychiatry overly incompatible with prevailing social values (particularly with the normative and regulative principle of inclusion of all individuals in the different functional spheres of society and with the common patterns of participation in modern function systems) and has, in turn, required the availability of psychiatric care for a growing number of individuals. After presenting this account, some major challenges for the future of mental health care provision, such as the overburdening of services or the overt exclusion of a significant group of potential users, are identified and briefly discussed.

La pratique de l'esprit humain : l'institution asilaire et la révolution démocratique

Citations

Invention of hysteria : Charcot and the photographic iconography of the Salpêtrière

The mentally ill and social exclusion: a critical examination of the use of seclusion from the patient's perspective

Managing the contradictions : Recovery from severe mental disorders

Curing the soul of the nation: psychiatry, society, and psycho-politics in the German-speaking countries, 1918-1939

Mental health care and the politics of inclusion: A social systems account of psychiatric deinstitutionalization

Related Papers (5)

Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique

Le sujet de la folie : naissance de la psychiatrie

L'ordre psychiatrique : l'âge d'or de l'aliénisme

Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison

Histoire de la folie de l'Antiquité à nos jours