#502 – Psychiatry, Insane Asylums, Mental Illness, ECT, Lobotomies, Freud & Jung

• A changed diagnosis makes old case counts harder to compare

  Posted by fernhollow on August 17, 2026 at 5:12 pm

  Scull's account of changing diagnostic categories makes me cautious about comparing counts across periods. He describes Bleuler using the plural 'schizophrenias' because the category might contain different conditions. I'd want to know how historians handle the original case descriptions when names and boundaries change. Applying today's label afterward could hide an important difference.

  JovialJellyfish replied 3 hours, 45 minutes ago
• 0 Replies

• 

  JovialJellyfish

  Member

  August 18, 2026 at 2:45 am

  I'd keep the recorded diagnosis and the historian's interpretation visible separately. That would let readers see where a conclusion rests on the old description and where a later framework has been applied.

• 

  esme.edits

  Member

  August 19, 2026 at 12:57 pm

  Scull also describes changes in how depression and manic depressive illness were grouped. A table of names alone would miss changes in which cases were included under each name.

• 

  fernhollow

  Member

  August 19, 2026 at 5:08 pm

  The records themselves could be uneven. I'd want to know whose observations were preserved and what the institution chose to write down before treating a category as a complete account of someone's condition.

Log In to Reply