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  • Title: ["Or should we be cured just to [..] be constantly confronted with the fact that we have to stay here forever [..]?" The view of psychiatric patients between illness, normalization and normality (1921-1937)].
    Author: Beyer C.
    Journal: Med Ges Gesch; 2011; 30():49-83. PubMed ID: 22701951.
    Abstract:
    In German psychiatry, a distinct change occurred in the 1920s with regard to types of treatment. By introducing work therapy, early releases and psychiatric support outside the asylums the number of in-patients was to be reduced. As a consequence social approaches began to dominate psychiatric discourse. These approaches aimed at normalizing everyday life in the institutions and at implementing treatments that would allow patients to be reintegrated into society. Based on numerous documents on a patient who had spent the 1920s and early 1930s in a mental institution, the article adds a patient's view to the psychiatrists' perspective that has so far dominated the history of psychiatry of the Weimar Republic. The documents allow for an in-depth investigation of both the potential and the limitations of the approaches to psychiatric reform prevalent at the time. They illustrate, from a micro-perspective, the field of tension between psychiatric diagnosis, life in the asylum and integration into society that, in the case of this patient, became especially poignant with the patient's release at the time of the Third Reich sterilization laws.
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