Dear H-Madness readers,
Three new articles have recently been published in History of Psychiatry. You can find their titles and abstracts below.
Universalism and its Others: Transcultural psychiatry and Swedish exceptionalism after 1945, by Mattias Strand (Open access)
“This article traces the historical development of transcultural psychiatry in Sweden from the post-Second World War period to the early 21st century. It argues that the field emerged at the intersection of welfare universalism, humanitarian internationalism, and clinical encounters with migration-related distress. Shaped by labor migration and later refugee reception, Swedish transcultural psychiatry became strongly oriented toward trauma, particularly in relation to war and displacement. While this focus helped institutionalize specialized services and legitimize migrant suffering within psychiatric care, it also individualized structurally produced distress. The article further examines how Swedish exceptionalist self-understandings – especially notions of colorblindness and moral humanitarianism – both enabled and constrained the field, contributing to the relative neglect of racism and the mental health of national minorities”.
Demanding characteristics: Psychiatry, psychology and the social sciences in Martin T. Orne’s therapy of Anne Sexton, by James Bradley (Open access)
“This article uses Anne Sexton’s therapy by Martin T. Orne as a frame for investigating and contextualising the unusual therapeutic rationale that lay behind her treatment. The rationale had three sources: the results of Orne’s experimental psychological research, particularly the ‘demand characteristics of social psychology experiments’; the functional sociology of Robert Merton and Talcott Parsons; and the influence of Jerome D. Frank’s concept of ‘effective hope’. Unpacking this story builds on the work of a number of historians who have destabilised one of the major binaries that has shaped historiographical interpretations of post-war psychiatry (i.e. biological psychiatry vs Freudianism), opens up a space for further investigations of interdisciplinarity in psychiatry, while providing a better understanding of why Orne treated Sexton the way he did”.
Female psychiatrists on screen: Cinematic stereotypes and therapeutic authority, 1935–2021, by Dennis Henkel, Walter Stehling, and Katja Wagemans
“Throughout the 20th century, women entered psychiatry, yet cinematic representations remained structured by masculinised archetypes such as Dr Evil, Dr Wonderful, and Dr Dippy. This article interrogates depictions of female psychiatrists in nineteen films and one paradigmatic television series (1935–2021) through a historically grounded qualitative analysis. It identifies two gendered figures – Dr Correction and Dr Trapped – that reconfigure the masculine triad into a moral continuum of care, control and vulnerability. By situating these tropes within psychiatry’s shifting professional and moral framework, the study contends that visual media did not merely reflect psychiatry’s feminisation but actively mediated it, producing new affective regimes of therapeutic authority. Cinema thus emerges as a site where psychiatry’s gendered epistemologies were imagined, contested and negotiated”.
