The purpose of this study is to investigate how cordinated on a national level the Swedish psychiatric care was in the early 1900s, using the diagnoses and treatment of dementia primaria. I also wanted to find out if the treatment of dementia primaria differentiated from the general care of psychiatric patients in the early 1900s, which other studies had focused on. The study was based on five records of patients with dementia primaria. The records came from six hospitals in total. All five patients experienced acute psychosis the time before the admission. In the hospital they shifted between calm, anxious and apathetic episodes. All five patients also had a habit of talking and laughing to themselves. There were some individual differences, but not enough to point to a non-coordinated psychiatric care. Similarly the treatment of dementia primaria differenced very little between hospitals, pointing to a strongly cordinated psychiatric care system. Some differences between previous research, concerning the treatment of psychiatric patients in general, and my study were found. Mainly where the patients whose records I studied medicated with a higher rate of barbiturates than previous research mentioned.

The Swedish mental health care system underwent a reconstruction during the 17th century. Mentally sick people who were enclosed and hidden from the society were now moved to newly built hospitals, with a specialization in mental rehabilitation, due to the number of mentally sick people in Sweden rising during the 17thcentury. In 1923, a new way of treating and rehabilitating patients was enforced, called occupational therapy. Occupational therapy meant that the patients would be assigned jobs or other occupations, instead of being bedridden, which was often the way patients were previously treated at the beginning of the 18th century. Occupational therapy became highly popular in Sweden, due to the new hospitals that were built being very expensive for the Swedish tax-payers. The new way of treating patients with occupational therapy became an economic priority for the hospitals. Mariebergs Hospital in Kristinehamn was also, at the time, using other new was of treating patients like lobotomy and electroshock therapy. In this essay, we will get in contact with the patients that underwent lobotomy treatment and were sterilized without their consent. The purpose of this essay is to focus on what kind of people were hospitalized in the mental hospitals during the 18thcentury and how they were cared for in various ways. This essay will be based on two thesis statements that were crafted by sociologist Bengt Sjöström in order to interpret the material that appears in this enquiry.

Under den andra halvan av 1800-talet genomgick den svenska sinnessjukvården stora förändringar. Nya sjukhus byggdes, den ekonomiska situationen förbättrades och sinnessjukvården i stort genomgick en professionalisering. Det fanns även en behandlingsoptimism som bidrog till en övertygelse om att de patienter som blivit intagna skulle komma att lämna sjukhusen som nya människor. Detta blev dock inte fallet. Istället blev sinnessjukhusen överfulla med patienter som aldrig skulle bli utskrivna. Vården kom istället att bestå av vila och övervakning. Under denna tid fanns det även tydliga motsättningar mellan läkarens bild av sina patienter och patientens egna bild av sig själv och systemet hon befann sig i. I denna uppsats möter vi fem kvinnliga patienter som var intagna på Vänersborgs hospital och asyl i början av 1900-talet. Kvinnorna var intagna av olika anledningar och hade olika bakgrund, men trots det möttes de ändå av samma inställning, där nästan allt de sade och gjorde tolkades av deras läkare som tydliga sjukdomssymptom. Patienterna såg inte sig själva som sinnessjuka, och de ville därför bli utskrivna från sjukhuset och återvända till sina nära och kära. Kontrasten mellan läkaren och patientens upplevelser utforskas i denna uppsats. Slutsatsen är att patienterna utlämnades helt till läkarna och deras bedömningar och tolkningar, då de varken hade möjligheterna eller resurserna som hade krävts för att stå upp emot dessa inflytelserika och mäktiga män. Det finns dock en ljusglimt, för trots alla försök att isolera och avskärma dessa kvinnor bröts aldrig bandet mellan de fem patienterna och deras familjer. I slutändan fick samtliga återvända till sina nära och kära, döda eller levande.

This paper is interested in Swedish psychiatry during the period between 1930-1950,localized to Mariebergs hospital in Sweden. The purpose of this paper has been to testSjöstroms evidence of the pattern that he used to create three analytical concepts, roughlytranslated to; morally educative discipline-treatment, the production process and the idealinstitution citizen. Sjöström motivates that his concepts gives insight into one aspect of thepsychiatric expansion between 1860-1960 as well as creates an understanding of psychiatryas an institution. The source material for this paper has been patients' medical notes writtenby the chief physician of the institution. Via a method which mainly different from Sjöstromin its selection, categorization and more thorough presentation, this paper has seen the samepatterns which Sjöström has created his three concepts from. The ideal institution citizen,defined by its well behaved and calm behaviour emerges also in this papers quantitativecompilation of qualitative data as the clear majority. The morally educative disciplinetreatment,treatments and punishments that focuses on creating an acceptable behaviourrather than the treatment of insanity itself, can be seen in the adjective behaviouraldescriptions of the type well-behaved / badly-behaved which are dominant. The focus in thejournals is behaviour rather than mental decease symptoms such as hallucinations andtreatment is based on unaccepted behaviour rather than symptoms. Also, the sequential orderthat exists between badly-behaved behaviour and treatments, and well-behaved behaviourand rewards shows the focus on behaviour which the concept is based on. The previous tworesults together is the two parts of Sjöströms production process, that trough the morallyeducative discipline-treatment the institution creates an acceptable, quiet and well behavedideal institution citizen were the mental decease becomes secondary.

No description available.

The aim of the paper was to identify tendencies in the type of descriptions, categories, and identities that the doctors at the mental hospital Stockholm’s hospital gave to the mentally ill patients. The time period was chosen for a few specific reasons, one being Bror Gadelius, then chief physician at the mental hospital and his ambitions for a humanistic care of the mentally ill. The other reason is that this period has been forgotten in Swedish history of mental health care as it fell between the 18th and 19th century ‘surveillance and control’, and on the other hand a period of electrical treatments, lobotomies,and sterilisations to ‘treat’ mental illness and fix society during 1930-1950. In the paper, two theories are used to be able to discern tendencies and different attitudes from the doctors in the patient records. The first is the intersectional perspective with some main categories such as Gender, Class, Body, and Sexuality, but also smaller categories that I discovered during the research. These are somewhat abstract yet self-explanatory: Curable/Incurable, meaning whether the attitude in the records suggests that there was any chance for the patient to get well. Talking/Not talking, where the patient's ability or unwillingness to talk to the doctor changes how the patient is described, and finally Docile/Resistant, which means that the patient is described according to how they behave in accordance with the norms of the mental hospital. The second theory is about objective medicine, which developed with the natural sciences, and the need to be scientifically accurate and to be able to define what disease is, what it looks like and its dimensions. However, when objective medicine developed, it was based on a subjective basis, and therefore being ill meant being 'ugly' and not conforming to societal norms. The two theories work well together because they both highlight historically changing meanings within patients' categories and given identities. Although these are two major theories, the paper is still a micro-historical study, I wanted to get up close to the source material and thoroughly examine the different ways in which patients could be described in the mental hospital. And I believe that it is possible, even with a small study of ten patient records, to provide some nuances of how the doctors viewed the mentally ill patients in the early 20th century.