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The history of psychiatric institutions and the psychiatric profession is by now familiar: asylums multiplied in nineteenth-century England and psychiatry established itself as a medical specialty around the same time. We are, however, largely ignorant about madness at home in this key period: what were the family's attitudes toward its insane member, what were patient's lives like when they remained at home? Until now, most accounts have suggested that the family and community gradually abdicated responsibility for taking care of mentally ill members to the doctors who ran the asylums. However, this provocatively argued study, painting a fascinating picture of how families viewed and managed madness, suggests that the family actually played a critical role in caring for the insane and in the development of psychiatry itself. Akihito Suzuki's richly detailed social history includes several fascinating case histories, looks closely at little studied source material including press reports of formal legal declarations of insanity, or Commissions of Lunacy, and also provides an illuminating historical perspective on our own day and age, when the mentally ill are mainly treated in home and community.

Mental Disorders --- History, 19th Century. --- Psychiatry --- England. --- Mental health laws --- Mentally ill --- Medicine and psychology --- Mental health --- Psychology, Pathological --- Law and mental illness --- Mental disability law --- Mental illness --- Mental illness and law --- People with mental disabilities --- Insane --- Mental patients --- Mentally disordered --- Sick --- 19th Cent. History (Medicine) --- 19th Cent. History of Medicine --- 19th Cent. Medicine --- Historical Events, 19th Century --- History of Medicine, 19th Cent. --- History, Nineteenth Century --- Medical History, 19th Cent. --- Medicine, 19th Cent. --- 19th Century History --- 19th Cent. Histories (Medicine) --- 19th Century Histories --- Cent. Histories, 19th (Medicine) --- Cent. History, 19th (Medicine) --- Century Histories, 19th --- Century Histories, Nineteenth --- Century History, 19th --- Century History, Nineteenth --- Histories, 19th Cent. (Medicine) --- Histories, 19th Century --- Histories, Nineteenth Century --- History, 19th Cent. (Medicine) --- Nineteenth Century Histories --- Nineteenth Century History --- history. --- History --- Family relationships --- Home care --- Care --- Law and legislation --- Legal status, laws, etc. --- Patients --- History of human medicine --- History of the United Kingdom and Ireland --- anno 1800-1899 --- asylum. --- caregiver. --- commission of lunacy. --- disability. --- english madness. --- family. --- history of madness. --- history of medicine. --- home health care. --- insanity. --- lunacy. --- madman. --- madness. --- madwoman. --- medical specialty. --- mental disability. --- mental health. --- mental hospital. --- mental illness. --- nonfiction. --- psychiatric institutions. --- psychiatric profession. --- psychiatry. --- psychology. --- social history.