Abstract

SALCEDO, José Fernando Sánchez. Diagnosis and Medication: The Medical practice in the Psychiatric Hospital of the Valle 1956-1970. univ.humanist. [online]. 2017, n.83, pp.331-359. ISSN 0120-4807.  https://doi.org/10.11144/Javeriana.uh83.dmpm.

At the middle of the twentieth century, an institutional change in the diagnosis and treatment of insanity took place in Colombia. New conceptions of mental illness arose and psychiatry departments were created, both in old and in newly opened medicine faculties, which implemented new treatments influenced by American psychiatry. Following a line of historiographic research, this work seeks to describe, through the review of 308 medical histories as the main source, the type of diagnoses and the treatment used during the process of transition of Cali’s Asylum to become a psychiatric hospital, between 1956 and 1970. Prominent among our main findings is the institutionalization of a set of medical practices that reveals a clear influence of North American Psychiatry. With regard to treatment, the stories show the frequent use of new antipsychotic drugs, combined with electroshock therapy, occupational therapy and psychotherapy.

Keywords : institutional change; psychiatry; diagnostics; psychiatric therapies.

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