Historical essay: electroconvulsive therapy, memory, and self in America

Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) practitioners and anti-ECT activists have divergent interpretations of both the treatment and its history. Despite claims by ECT opponents that practitioners do not acknowledge memory side effects, the published literature on the procedure demonstrates psychiatrists' awareness of this issue. And though current ECT practitioners claim that memory side effects were mostly the result of outmoded methods, investigators continue to publish studies that indicate ongoing memory problems. This article explores the conflict between pro- and anti-ECT groups around the issue of memory side effects in the broader context of changes in American psychiatry and society.     

Science, gender, and the emergence of depression in American psychiatry, 1952-1980

Between the first (1952) and the third (1980) editions of psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, depression emerged as a specific disease category with concrete criteria. In this article, I analyze this change over time in psychiatric theory and diagnosis through an examination of medication trials and category formation. Throughout, I pay particular attention to the ways in which psychiatrists and researchers invoked science in their clinical trials and disease theories, as well as the ways in which gender played an important but largely unspoken role in the formation of a category of depression.     

Beyond social construction: toward new histories of psychiatry (review essay)

Focusing on symptom classification and on the outcome of somatic interventions, Berrios and Shorter challenge the social constructionist and anti-psychiatry tendencies that have framed the writing of the history of psychiatry for the past quarter-century. Contextualizing clinical interventions, these studies point out the value of examining the proposition that practitioners were motivated as much about curing distress as they were about eliminating nonconformity. Such examinations require an understanding of the strengths and limits of medical science that often have been trivialized or ignored by some social constructionists. Together the studies under review open the possibility that recent biological interventions may have transformed psychiatry in such fundamental ways that they call into question the assumptions that have underlay in an almost two-century-old classification system. Ironically, adherence to the scientific method (falsification) reveals that the biological revolution in psychiatry fits post-modern claims about the tentative nature of knowledge claims, while it simultaneously undercuts the particular historical interpretations of post-modern scholarship.     

Clio, Columbia, And The Cosmopolitans: Beyond American Exceptionalism And The Nation–State

Books reviewed in this article:
Thomas Bender, Rethinking American History In A Global Age     

Beyond Naivety: Women,Gender Inequality and Participatory Development

In recent years, participatory development has become an established orthodoxy among development agencies across the political spectrum; at the same time, the importance of consulting with and recruiting women has been highlighted in most discussions of participatory strategies. Drawing on the author's own research and a range of secondary sources, this article focuses on gender aspects of participatory projects. The evidence suggests that gender inequalities in resources, time availability and power, influence the activities, priorities and framework of participatory projects just as much as ‘top-down’ development and market activities. Contrary to the view of a number of writers and activists on participatory development, increasing the numbers of women involved in participatory projects cannot, therefore, be seen as a soft alternative to specific attention to change in gender inequality. Meeting the demands of poor women in the South will require not only local participatory projects, but a linking with wider movements for change in the national and international development agenda.     

Legitimacy and Public Policy: Seeing Beyond Effectiveness,Efficiency, and Performance

Studies of failure typically assess public policies through the lenses of effectiveness, efficiency, and performance. Here I wish to propose a further dimension to the evaluation and assessment of policy failure—legitimacy. The substantive elements of public policies and the procedural steps taken by authoritative decision makers during the policy cycle affect the perception of policy legitimacy held by both stakeholders and the public. In substantive terms, policy content should align with the dominant attitudes of the affected policy community and, ideally, the broader public. Procedurally, factors such as policy incubation, the emotive appeals deployed to gain support for an initiative, and the processes of stakeholder engagement shape the legitimacy of public policies and the governments who promote them. This argument is based on a comparison of education reform in two Canadian provinces during the 1990s. Governments in Alberta and Ontario pursued common agendas of education reform, but while Alberta achieved success, the Ontario government experienced a series of setbacks and lost the support of education stakeholders and the public. The root of Ontario's failures lies in the realm of legitimacy. These findings highlight the fact that the strategies used for enacting policy change may fail to bring about the necessary consensus among societal actors to sustain a new policy direction and calls attention to our need to better understand how governments can achieve meaningful public participation while still achieving legislative success in an efficient fashion.     

Anthropology of Eurasia,Postsocialism and Beyond

David M. Engel. Code and Custom in a Thai Provincial Court: the Interaction of Formal and Informal Systems of Justice. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, The Association for Asian Studies, 1978. 230 pp.     

Libya and Syria: R2P and the spectre of the swinging pendulum

This article examines recent UN Security Council deliberations over events in Libya and Syria and in particular assesses the extent to which Council members sought to justify their positions and voting behaviour by reference to the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P). It shows how limited invocations of R2P were with regard to Libya, before proceeding to demonstrate how, somewhat paradoxically, R2P‐sceptics such as Russia and China subsequently drew upon concerns over the manner in which NATO implemented its UN‐mandate in Libya to cast doubts over R2P during debates over Syria. Contemplating the implications of the Libyan and Syrian cases for the future of R2P, the article concludes by arguing that the concept's international standing can best be preserved through the excision of its most coercive elements; R2P should be reconstituted as a standard of acceptable sovereign behaviour and a mechanism geared towards the provision of international guidance and support, while decisions over coercive military intervention, inevitably infused with considerations of strategic interest, should be made outside the R2P framework.