History of Psychiatry, The

Shorter, Edward. How Prozac Slew Freud. American Heritage 49, no. 5 (September 1998) 42-44. In this brief history of psychiatry, the author examines remarkable changes in the treatment of mental illness. Rather than treating problems with drawn-out therapy, psychiatrists most often end a patient visit with a prescription to antidepressant drugs like Prozac. The article illustrates the wide-ranging impact over the last several decades of new prescription drugs. 

Psychiatrists, psychologists, philosophers, politicians, and others who labor to assimilate mental illness to body illness systematically fail to acknowledge that an intrinsic function—I would say primary function—of the mental hospital has always been the psychiatric segregation and control of unwanted persons, justified by their alleged dangerousness to themselves and/or others. This contention is confirmed by the whole history of psychiatry the so-called psychiatric abuses in National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union and the continued popularity, in the West, of psychiatric rationales and facilities for imprisoning individuals whose detention cannot be justified as punishment for crime.Recent opinions by Justices of the Supreme Court amply support this interpretation. 

The decree of Louis XIII was not a solitary occurrence. It has been repeated time and again through the history of psychiatry. The German mental hospital system, for example, was inaugurated in 1805 with the following declaration by Prince Karl August von Hardenberg ... 

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