Keep Your Labels Off My Mind! or “Now I Am Going to Pretend I Am Crazy but Dont Be a Bit Alarmed”: Psychiatric History from the Patients’ Perspectives

Why should historians of medicine, or historians anywhere, be interested in looking at the history of psychiatry from the perspectives of those deemed to be mad by their contemporaries? The answer should be obvious: to try to give a voice to those who have been and continue to be among the most marginalized members of society, while also attempting to redress the balance in a field where much of the scholarship has been written from the perspective of observers rather than the observed. In recent years a number of studies have helped to shed more light on what life was like for people considered insane, and greater attention is being devoted to uncovering their long-neglected voices.