New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Heather Murray, "Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

Aug 13, 2024
Heather Murray, a cultural and intellectual historian, discusses her book on the experiences of psychiatric patients in 20th-century America. She challenges common perceptions of patients as passive, revealing their active engagement with societal and personal issues. Topics include the impact of deinstitutionalization on mental health narratives, the philosophical implications of resignation, and how modernity shaped psychiatric institutions. Murray also reflects on post-war shifts in psychiatric understanding and its influence on identity and individualism.
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