Doing psychiatry engages with the history of European psychiatry in the second half of the twentieth century through a close and fresh look at the practices that contributed to reshape the mental health field. Case studies from across Europe allow readers to appreciate how new 'ways of doing' contributed to transform the field, beyond the watchwords of deinstitutionalisation, the prescription of neuroleptics, centrality of patients and overcoming of asylum-era habits. Through a variety of sources and often adopting a small-scale perspective, the chapters take a close look at the way new practices emerged and at how they installed themselves, eventually facing resistance, injecting new purposes and contributing to enlarging psychiatry's fields of expertise, therefore blurring its once-more-defined boundaries.

Just another turn? Practices, doing psychiatry and historiography - Volker Hess and Marianna Scarfone
Part I - Visions and Dreams
1 New practices, new institutions: Group psychotherapy in Greece and the Open Psychotherapy Centre of Athens, 1960s-80s - Despo Kritsotaki
2 The Gorizia experiment: The genesis of therapeutic practices in Basaglia's psychiatric community (1962-68) - Marica Setaro
3 Social psychiatry in the making: Practices at Heidelberg's Psychiatric University Clinic in the 1960s and 1970s - Gundula Gahlen
4 'The general atmosphere of this admission unit is reassuring and optimistic': Modernism, architectural research and evolving psychiatric reforms in post-war England - Christina Malathouni
Part II - Experimentation
5 Non-hierarchical experimentation: The outpatient treatment of drug-using young people in Finland, 1969-75 - Katariina Parhi
6 Last resort or early intervention: Discourse and practice of psychosurgery in Strasbourg (late 1940s-early 1960s) - Florent Serina
7 Treating mutism in Hungarian child psychiatry, 1957-60 - Gábor Csikós
Part III - Reflections
8 Changing attitudes: Psychoanalytic therapy of psychoses in 1950s clinical psychiatry - Marietta Meier
9 In the wake of Goffman? Doing social sciences at the site of psychiatry in Austria - Monika Ankele
10 Writing patients: Group psychotherapy and reform efforts in 1970s GDR university psychiatry - Henriette Voelker
Part IV - Crossing institutional boundaries
11 Neuroleptics outside psychiatry: Sedating deviant youth in the 1960s and 1970s in Belgium's juvenile institutions - Benoît Majerus and David Niget
12 Psychiatric practices beyond psychiatry: The sexological administration of transgender life around 1980 - Ketil Slagstad

Editors

Gundula Gahlen is a research associate at Ludwig-Maximilians-University.
Volker Hess is chair of the Institute for the History of Medicine at the Charité Medical School.
Marianna Scarfone is an associate professor at Strasbourg University.
Henriette Voelker is a research associate at the Institute for the History of Medicine.