This open access book demonstrates that, while occupation has been used to treat the mentally disordered since the early nineteenth century, approaches to its use have varied across different countries and in different time periods. Comparing how occupation was used in French and English mental institutions between 1918 and 1939, one hundred years after the heyday of moral therapy, the book is an essential read for those researching the history of mental health and medicine more generally. It provides an overview of the legislation, management structures and financial conditions that affected mental institutions in France and England, and contributed to their differing responses to the new theories of occupational therapy emerging from the USA and Germany during the interwar period.
1. Introduction.- 2. Patient Work before the First World War.- 3. From Alienism to Psychiatry.- 4. New Approaches to Patient Work and Occupation.- 5. Money and Management.- 6. The Medical Prescription of Patient Occupation.- 7. The Supervision of Patient Occupation.- 8. The Patient Workers Inside Hospital.- 9. Work and Support for Patients Outside Hospital.- Conclusions.
Jane Freebody is a historian of medicine whose research interests revolve around nineteenth- and twentieth-century psychiatry and mental health in France and England. She is an Associate Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, UK, where she previously gained her Wellcome-funded doctorate.
The most interesting and novel areas of the book are the chapters dealing with occupation after the First World War. The beginnings of the US approach, and its adoption by David Henderson, offers insight into its popularity in England, given that Henderson and Gillespie s textbook was a standard in British psychiatry for so many decades. ... Work and Occupation in French and English Mental Hospitals offers a valuable addition to the history of psychiatry. (Sarah Chaney, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 64, 2025)
