Child and adolescent psychiatry in France and Scotland, 1870-1914

Abstract

This thesis argues that child and adolescent psychiatry emerged as a relevant medical specialty in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in both France and Scotland. The psychiatric study of the child and adolescent became encompassed within larger social and medical discourses on the young, including debates about education, infant health and juvenile delinquency. From the 1870s onwards, the influence of Darwinian ideas within psychiatry offered in both nations a new approach to the relationship between mental afflictions and age, by binding concepts of physiological, physical and mental development together. The multiplication of scientific publications on the onset, characteristics and treatment of mental disorders in young people suggested that they were seen and diagnosed by psychiatrists. In this process, the asylum and special institutions stood out as strategic environments requiring historical examination. Mental institutions were intrinsically intertwined within complex social, economic and political patterns on local, regional and international levels. Their comparison then relies on the understanding of their specific social and scientific context and management as well as their contribution to a larger network of care.

This thesis aims firstly to identify the targeted demographic group within selected mental institutions in both France and Scotland in order to investigate the institutional, regional, national and transnational patterns of admission of young people. Then, from a qualitative viewpoint, the study of young people’s cases would help to understand the development of trends within the medical literature as well as conceptual and practical divergences within institutions and nations. In this sense, the larger social and scientific context of both France and Scotland remains essential in the shaping of child and adolescent psychiatry, emphasising further parallels and discrepancies. The review of medical and social literature on the child and adolescent as well as the examination of case studies at both Scottish and French institutions thus provide evidence of the formation of a new normative psychiatric discourse on the child and adolescent, influenced by and influencing contemporary social, political, economic, and cultural debates in both nations.