Posts Tagged ‘ Germany ’

The Endurance of Graphology in France

_67079872_handwriting624

Hugh Schofield at BBC News Paris has posted an interesting article on the continued use of the field of graphology in France.  In contrast to much of the rest of the world apparently, French employers continue to rely on this form of handwriting analysis. Schofield cites a 1991 independent study that found ”that a massive 91% of public and private organisations in France were then making use of handwriting analysis.”

In France, the field is associated with the work of the French Catholic priest, Jean-Hipployte Michon (1806-1881).  In Germany, graphology has been historically connected to the characterologist Ludwig Klages  (1872-1956).   And, in fact, historian Per Leo has just published a book examining the tangled history of graphology in Germany, along with its ties to anti-semitism.

2013
04/29
CATEGORY
article
1 comment

A new book on the so called ‘T4 operation’

The so called „T4 operation“, so titled for the street address of the office in charge, was the centrally organized „euthanasia“ of national socialist which brought death to more than 70.000 people. This operation was the first systematically planned and realised extermination against a week minority within the „Third Reich“. Mainly inmates and patients of asylums were murdered at six, especially for the purpose equipped hospital grounds, the so-called extermination sites. The people were killed by gas in newly constructed gas chambers. The T4 operation must be seen as a central part of the patient killing during the Nazi period which counted more than 300.000 victims and which was connected with the holocaust due to the fact that the physicians and nurses involved in the patient murder were taken as experts to concentration camps in Eastern Europe for their advise.

This publication presents the current state of research on the organisation of the T4 operation as well as the first results of a large-scale study focussing on the victims and their biographies.

2010
05/04
CATEGORY
announcements
book
4 comments

Die Grenzen der Anstalt

Die überarbeitete Habilitationsschrift der deutschen Historikerin Cornelia Brink erscheint dieser Tage auf dem Buchmarkt. Der Umschlagtext auf dem Rückdeckel präsentiert das Buch wie folgt:

Im 19. Jahrhundert etablierten sich Irrenanstalten als Orte der Verwahrung für psychisch Kranke und werden seitdem gefürchtet. Die Kritik an der Anstalt ist so alt wie die Institution selbst, Psychiatriegeschichte ist daher ohne die Geschichte der Psychiatriekritik nicht zu schreiben. Trotz unübersehbarer Probleme und wiederkehrender öffentlicher Kontroversen blieb die Anstalt lange Zeit die zentrale Einrichtung für die Behandlung und Kontrolle psychischer Abweichungen. Erst in den 1970er Jahren wurden grundlegende Reformen durchgeführt. Was waren die Bedingungen für diese Reformen? Auf welche Änderungen zielten sie? Welche Kontinuitäten lassen sich feststellen?
Cornelia Brink untersucht die Psychiatrie als Teil des Ordnungsgefüges einer Gesellschaft. Ihr Fokus liegt dabei auf der Schwelle zwischen Psychiatrie und Außenwelt, die dem Drinnen und dem Draußen angehört: ein Ort von medizinischer und sozialer Relevanz, von rechtlichen Regelungen und hoher symbolischer Bedeutung. Die Untersuchung eröffnet eine neue Perspektive auf die Psychiatrie, deren Geschichte an die Gesellschaftsgeschichte rückgebunden wird.

2010
04/19
CATEGORY
announcements
book
Leave a comment

The History of Health Insurance and Mental Illness

The historical branches of German social insurance

The successful passage of health insurance reform legislation in the United States moves me to wonder about the extent to which scholars have looked into the role of health insurance in mental health care.  About ten years ago, a number of us historians examined the impact of mental illness on social insurance in Germany around the years 1880-1930.  Perhaps not surprisingly, the rise of shellshock in World War I and the killing of 200,000 psychiatric patients by the Nazis under their T-4 program provided the backdrop and inspiration for much of this research.   In my own study of disability within early German social insurance (Making Security Social), I found that providing health care benefits to those suffering from work-related nervous illnesses prompted a vocal, organized, and persistent backlash from those who contended that the system was only rewarding malingering.  The fact that some claimants contended that their nervous symptoms were caused, not by a factory accident, but rather by the torturous process of applying for a pension itself only seemed to confirm the view that social insurance and mental illness did not mix well.   In fact by the 1920s and 1930s, “pension neuroses” – as they were called – were publicly pilloried by conservatives, liberals, and the Nazis as emblematic of a social insurance system that bred whining and undermined productivity and masculinity.  Interestingly enough, however, the Nazis found it politically impossible to dismantle the social insurance system, despite the fact that many reformers in their party wished to do so.  So, there is certainly historical evidence indicating that, indeed, insurance systems do create new constituencies that provide powerful support for the system’s continuation.

So, I have some questions for others.  Are there good historical studies out there (articles or monographs) which examine insurance’s impact on mental illness and mental health and vice versa?  What role has health insurance played in reinforcing or undermining professional, institutional, and social trends and practices?  For instance, to what extent was social insurance responsible for the post-World War II boom in psychotherapeutic professionals and services?  What role have pharmaceutical companies played in health insurance systems affecting mental health across the globe?  What effects did health insurance schemes have on the process widely known as deinstitutionalization?  Please post any responses on the blog.

GE

2010
03/23
CATEGORY
discussion
1 comment

New Issue of Psychiatrie, sciences humaines, neurosciences

The latest issue of Psychiatrie, sciences humaines, neurosciences is dedicated to psychiatry in a colonial context. One article is specifically dedicated to the history of the notion of obsession in Germany.

Psychiatrie au-delà du Rhin: obsessions et compulsions dans la psychiatrie de langue allemande by M. Géraud (Centre hospitalier Charles-Perrens, Bordeaux). The abstract reads:

The notion of obsession was built late in France. The same is true in German-speaking countries (first occurring in 1867). But obsessional disorders have kept a more autonomous nosographic position in these latter countries than in France, where obsession has long been connected with the idea of degeneration, which is not given emphasis in Germany. Mentioned for the first time by Krafft-Ebing in 1867 and by Griesinger in 1868, obsession (Zwangsvorstellung) has been the subject of an exemplary clinical description by Westphal, in 1877, who defined it as an autonomous pathology radically different to “paranoia” (Verrücktheit) and melancholia; according to him, obsessions never change into delusions. This field has varied considerably in its symptomatic area: some authors going so far as to introduce the idea of obsession, sensations, feelings, impulses, and actions; obsession, according to Löwenfeld, encompass the intellectual, emotional, and motor functional spheres. Other authors, notably Bumke, keep to a more strictly defined area, within the direction defined by Westphal. Fundamental emotional disorders are either rejected or identified with anxiety. Connections with other illnesses have given rise to a number of concepts. Considered autonomous by Westphal and Bumke, obsessional symptomatology has been thought of, by other authors as primary or secondary to other pathologies, originating in melancholia or changing into it. The nosographic position varies. Either obsession is considered an autonomous illness or it is connected to other pathologies (neurasthenia, degeneration, Verrücktheit). Connections with other illnesses are dominated by relationships to melancholia; connections to paranoia are much more problematic; those with hysteria are seldom mentioned. After setting up frameworks for manic-depressive psychosis and schizophrenia (Kraepelin, Bleuler) and for hysteric neurosis (Freud), the nosographic position of obsessions, which have become “obsessional neurosis”, varies according to these pathologies and becomes complex. Kraepelin has it as an anxiety disorder connected to phobias but links some obsessions with “manic-depressive insanity”. The followers of Kraepelin insist on the connection with manic-depressive illness. Bleuler connects the obsessions to schizophrenia-schizothymia. These relations between obsession and schizophrenia give rise to abundant literature. Their links are located at a psychopathological level (“Spaltung,” the defense, slowing down, repairing and recovery from schizophrenia), at a symptomatological level (pedantry-mannerism, schizophrenic autism-closed aspect of the obsessed, their motor disorders-catatonia), or at a clinical level (obsession-schizophrenia association). Obsessions are considered by other authors as personality disorders. Notably by Kretschmer (sensitive reaction) or by Schneider as a psychopathic personality: anancastics, second subgroup of the self uncertain psychopaths. As for the anthropological-existential point of view, it tackles the patient with obsessive disorders in his or her totality and analyses the transcendental constitution of his or her world.

2010
03/23
CATEGORY
announcements
journal
1 comment

If you need translation use

http://translate.google.com

 Subscribe in a reader

To contact us

hpsychiatry [at] gmail.com
wordpress visitors
Site Meter
%d bloggers like this: