High society: drugs, mental health, and the history of psychiatry.

P sychiatrists and historians used to exist in a state of mutual mistrust and suspicion. Professional historians of a generation ago, much influenced by the radical epistemology of Michel Foucault (1), the sociological critiques of Erving Goffman (2), the countercultural theorizing of RD Laing (3), or the trenchant libertarianism of Thomas Szasz (4), came to portray the entire enterprise of modern psychiatry as a thinly veiled experiment in social control and professional monopolization. French-language scholars such as Robert Castel (5) and Yannick Ripa (6), as well as Anglo-American academics from David Rothman (7) and Andrew Scull (8) to Phyllis Chelser (9) and Elaine Showalter (10), constructed stinging histories of the rise of psychiatry (and its asylums), ripping into almost every aspect of modern psychiatric theory and practice. Psychiatry was attacked, from the left and from the right, by Marxists, feminists, and libertarians alike, as well as from within its own ranks. Little wonder, as Trevor Turner, the distinguished British psychiatrist-historian, remarked, that many psychiatrists retreated from engaging with their own history when it seemed that historians were preoccupied with framing psychiatry as the culprit responsible for most of modern society’s social problems (11).