Overview
- This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access
- Compares the history of French and English psychiatrists’ use of occupation in mental institutions
- Offers new insights into the use of occupation as a treatment for mental disorder
- Fills a gap in research on the history of psychiatry during the interwar period
Part of the book series: Mental Health in Historical Perspective (MHHP)
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Table of contents (10 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This open access book demonstrates that, while occupation has been used to treat the mentally disordered since the early nineteenth century, approaches to its use have varied across different countries and in different time periods. Comparing how occupation was used in French and English mental institutions between 1918 and 1939, one hundred years after the heyday of moral therapy, the book is an essential read for those researching the history of mental health and medicine more generally. It provides an overview of the legislation, management structures and financial conditions that affected mental institutions in France and England, and contributed to their differing responses to the new theories of occupational therapy emerging from the USA and Germany during the interwar period.
Reviews
"This ambitious exploration of patient occupation in interwar French and English mental institutions sheds light on a hitherto under-investigated aspect of life in the asylum – the nature, meaning and therapeutic implications of work for asylum regimes, staff and patients. This is an important and original study of value for anyone interested in twentieth-century psychiatry and institutional practices."
Hilary Marland, University of Warwick, Professor of History, Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Warwick, UK
"The interwar period is attracting growing interest among historians of psychiatry and mental health. Jane Freebody’s important new book provides a unique comparative study of patient occupation in English and French asylums, highlighting significant differences in practices as well as illustrating both continuities and innovations."
Leonard Smith, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, University of Birmingham, Instituteof Applied Health Research, USA
"Jane Freebody offers a fresh perspective on life in the asylum in both England and France which will be of interest to historians of the institutional everyday as well as historians of psychiatry. In this fascinating and original study, she not only focuses on the less examined interwar period and the importance of patient occupation, but, most strikingly, takes a comparative analysis that goes beyond the transnational into more detailed considerations of place; with an insightful evaluation of the metropolitan versus the provincial in shaping institutional responses."
Clare Hickman, Reader in Environmental and Medical History, University of Newcastle, Australia
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Jane Freebody is a historian of medicine whose research interests revolve around nineteenth- and twentieth-century psychiatry and mental health in France and England. She is an Associate Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, UK, where she previously gained her Wellcome-funded doctorate.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Work and Occupation in French and English Mental Hospitals, c.1918-1939
Authors: Jane Freebody
Series Title: Mental Health in Historical Perspective
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13105-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2023
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-13104-2Published: 02 January 2023
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-13107-3Published: 01 January 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-13105-9Published: 01 January 2023
Series ISSN: 2634-6036
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6044
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXII, 378
Number of Illustrations: 12 b/w illustrations
Topics: History of France, History of Britain and Ireland, History of Medicine, History of Science, Labor History