Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Learning from Alzheimer's Disease

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | Projects | Learning from Alzheimer's Disease | Sub-Projects | Forgetting Functional Psychosis: Biological Psychiatry in post-WWII Britain and the Rediscovery of the Schizophrenic Brain, 1970-1994

Forgetting Functional Psychosis: Biological Psychiatry in post-WWII Britain and the Rediscovery of the Schizophrenic Brain, 1970-1994

Alfred Freeborn

 

This doctoral thesis, with the working title "Forgetting Functional Psychosis: Biological Psychiatry in post-WWII Britain and the Rediscovery of the Schizophrenic Brain, 1970-1994", is devoted to the as yet unexplored history of the Northwick Park Clinical Research Centre (CRC). Not least against the background of the publicly contested crisis of legitimacy of psychiatry, this centre was founded in 1971 with a psychiatric research unit and high hopes for the interdisciplinary research approach of biological psychiatry. The CRC was closed a good twenty years later with equally great disappointment over the apparent lack of clinical success. In order to outline these events more precisely, Freeborn focuses on the relationship between British, American and German biomedical psychiatry in the period indicated. The ability to reliably diagnose the clinical picture of schizophrenia and at the same time to picture this disease entity through new imaging techniques became the litmus test of biological psychiatry. In the process, the historical and scientific relationship between Anglo-American and German psychiatry was reshaped. The doctoral thesis shows how the search for the schizophrenic brain silenced discussions about alternative understandings of this mental disorder and was launched by large-scale brain imaging programs in both research and the public media. In this way, Freeborn not only frames the development of biomedical models of schizophrenia against the background of anti-psychiatric discussions in the 1970s, but also makes it clear how brain imaging procedures moved between being a research instrument and an instrument of scientific politics.