Main description:

Examines psychiatric epidemiology's unique evolution, conceptually and socially, within and between diverse regions and cultures, underscoring its growing influence on the biopolitics of nations and worldwide health campaigns.

Psychiatric epidemiology, like the epidemiology of cancer, heart disease, or AIDS, contributes increasingly to shaping the biopolitics of nations and worldwide health campaigns. Despite the field's importance, this is the first volume of historical scholarship addressing psychiatric epidemiology. It seeks to comprehensively trace the development of the discipline and the mobilization of its constructs, methods, and tools to further social ends. It is through this double lens-conceptual and social-that it envisions the history of psychiatric epidemiology. Furthermore, its chapters constitute elements for that history as a global phenomenon, formed by multiple approaches. Those numerous historical paths have not resulted in a uniform disciplinary field based on a common paradigm, as happened arguably in the epidemiology of cardiovascular disease and cancer, but in a plurality of psychiatric epidemiologies driven by different intellectual questions, political strategies, reformist ideals, national cultures, colonial experiences, international influences, and social control objectives. When examined together, the chapters depict an uneven global development of epidemiologies formed within distinct political-cultural regions but influenced by the transnational circulation and selective uptake of concepts, techniques, and expertise. These moved through multidirectional pathways between and within the Global North and South. Authored by historians, anthropologists, and psychiatrists, chapters trace this complex history, focusing on Brazil, Nigeria, Senegal, India, Taiwan, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, as well as multicountry networks.

Contents:

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Anne M. Lovell and Gerald M. Oppenheimer
Part One: Constructing Mental Health Utopias and Dystopias with Epidemiology
1. From Epidemics of Terror to Landscapes of Fear: Psychiatric Epidemiology and the Psychological Reconstruction of Post-War Britain
Rhodri Hayward
2. Self-Participatory Surveillance: The Hisayama Study on Dementia in Japan
Junko Kitanaka
3. A Local Epistemic History of Psychiatric Epidemiology in Brazil: Pathways of Divergence from Global Epidemiology
Naomar Almeida-Filho
Part Two: Troubling the Boundaries of Psychiatric Epidemiology
4. When Risk Factor Epidemiology Met Mental Health: The Narrative of Cardiovascular Disease and the Type A Personality Pattern
Gerald M. Oppenheimer and Richard Neugebauer
5. The First Epidemiological Studies in the Transcultural Psychiatry Section at McGill University
Emmanuel Delille
Part Three: De-centering Psychiatric Epidemiology in a Postcolonial world
6. Of Fairies, Robots, Witches, and Zombies: Conceptualizing a History of Cross-Cultural Psychiatric Epidemiology in Nigeria
Matthew M. Heaton
7. Bringing Psychiatric Epidemiology to a Senegalese "Living Laboratory": Knowledge-Production and Erasure in the Interstices of Science
Anne M. Lovell
8. The Evolution of Community Epidemiological Studies in India: A Subaltern Critique
Pratap Sharan, Ananya Mahapatra, Debjani Das, and Alok Sarin
9. Taming the Tropics with Numbers: The Origins of Psychiatric Epidemiology in Colonial Taiwan
Harry Yi-Jui Wu
Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Index