The discipline of psychiatry is foundational to understanding a wide range of modern concepts, from personality and responsibility through to illness and deviancy. A sense of identities, motivations and patterns of behaviour are drawn from modern psychiatric ideas.

Psychiatry in Modern Britain provides a broad overview of psychiatric practice in Britain from the beginning of state-regulated asylums through to the advent of current policies of pharmaceutical treatment and community care.

Drawing on archival evidence and contemporary historiographical controversies, this volume will examine how the diagnosis and treatment of madness has been shaped through the rich interaction of social, scientific, political, economic and cultural factors.