From Paranoia Querulans to Vexatious Litigants - a short study on madness, between psychiatry and the Law Part 1 (original) (raw)
A short study on madness between psychiatry and the law. Part 1. Abstract This paper presents a comparative history of paranoia querulans, also known as litigants' delusion, in German--speaking countries and France from the nineteenth century onwards. We first focus on two classic literary works which describe litigious behaviours later pathologised, then give insight into the history of Querulantenwahn (litigants' delusion), a term coined in 1857 by Johann Ludwig Casper and adopted by German--speaking psychiatrists and forensic experts. The last section is devoted to its French equivalent, the delusion of the litigious persecuted--persecutors. We show how this category, widely popular among French fin--de-siecle alienists, was replaced by another: the delusion of revendication (litigious subtype). The history of the vexatious litigants in the English--speaking world will be explored in the second part of this paper.
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The second part of this paper examines the history of querulous paranoia and vexatious litigation in the English--speaking countries from the nineteenth century to today: this article suggests that the lack of deep--reaching research on querulous paranoia in these countries is due to a broad cultural, legal and medical context which have caused unreasonable complainants to be considered a purely legal, rather than a medical issue. To support this hypothesis, we analyse how legal steps have been taken throughout the English--speaking world since 1896 to keep the unreasonable complainants at bay and present reasons why medical measures have scarcely been adopted. However, we also submit evidence that this division of responsibilities between the judges and the psychiatrists has taken a new turn since the dawn of the twenty--first century.
The matter of forensic psychiatry: a historical enquiry
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Since antiquity, some men have not been considered accountable for their actions when they transgressed the law, and were exempted from legal penalties, or or given lesser ones. Why? The rationale for legal exemption has varied over time. So have the labels assigned to such lawbreakers, and even the personnel involved in the labelling process. For centuries, settling the question of deviant mental states of relevance to the court seemed relatively unproblematic. It was thought that personal acquaintance would easily discover such states of mind and the court could then be notified. It was not until the nineteenth century that western society felt a need to regulate this problematique. As a result, or as a precondition for this process of settling the question of legal accountability, the matter came to be construed in part as a medical problem. Physicians, and later psychiatrists, came to be regarded as possessing specific knowledge in this area which qualified them to judge a person's legal accountability. Personal knowledge of the deranged defendant was supplanted by professional knowledge of sanity and insanity as the basis for authority on the matter of accountability.
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Summary In Continental Philosophy of Psychiatry: The Lure of Madness Alastair Morgan surveys the contributions of a loosely conceived school of psychiatrists, philosophers and social theorists to understanding and responding to madness during the years 1910–1980. Taking my cue from him, I highlight some of the contributors discussed in Morgan's book and reflect that although madness may be difficult or even impossible to articulate effectively in discourse it remains a ‘limit experience’ which demarcates and illuminates the contours of other thinking and being, including reason and activism. I discuss social and cultural factors that have dulled clinicians’ sensitivities to the sounds of madness in recent decades and advocate the need for a reappraisal of our expertise and for a new activism today. What may at first appear as a failed clinical-philosophical tradition remains of professional relevance in today's rapidly transforming circumstances of practice both as inspirati...
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The article focuses on interpretations of madness in early nineteenth-century Hungary medical practice from a comparative perspective. By relying on the methodological approach of the anthropology of writing and the analytical considerations offered by Michel Foucault's 1973–1974 lectures on Psychiatric Power, the article discusses the formalized and standardized practices of case history writing. It draws on sources from the teaching clinics at the universities of Pest and Edinburgh, as well as the largest mental asylums in the Habsburg Monarchy in Vienna (est. 1784) and Prague (est. 1790), and the ideal type of mental asylums at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the York Retreat (est. 1796). In doing so, an attempt is made to reconstruct both the physicians' gaze and (to a certain extent) the patients' view, and by examining the therapeutical regime of each hospital and its correlations with the institutional background, uncover whether madness was perceived as a pathological somatic or psychological state in the medical practice of these institutions. This is in and of itself a fundamental question if we seek to understand changing attitudes towards the mad and their curability in a period of transition from a "world without psychiatry" to a "world of psychiatry," when specialized care was still not an option for many, especially in the East Central European region.
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