Matthew Smith

Despo Kritsotaki

Vicky Long

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

Past, Present and Future

Preventing Mental Illness

The book relates the history of post-war psychiatry, focusing on deinstitutionalisation, namely the shift from asylum to community in the second part of the twentieth century. After the Second World War, psychiatry and mental health care were reshaped by deinstitutionalisation. But what exactly was involved in this process? What were the origins of deinstitutionalisation and what did it mean to those who experienced it? What were the ramifications, both positive and negative, of such a fundamental shift in psychiatric care? Post-War Psychiatry in the Western World: Deinstitutionalisation and After seeks to answer these questions by exploring this momentous change in mental health care from 1945 to the present in a wide range of geographical settings. The book articulates a nuanced account of the history of deinstitutionalisation, highlighting the constraints and inconsistencies inherent in treating the mentally ill outside of the asylum, while seeking to inform current debates about how to help the most vulnerable members of society.

Vicky Long

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