HISTSCI 1772: Mental Health Matters: Historical Themes and Unfinished Business

Thursdays, 12-2:45pm

Science Center 309 (note new room location!)

Anne Harrington, faculty instructor

aharring@fas.harvard.edu

To sign up for Professor Harrington's office hours, click here! Links to an external site.

Professor Harrington also invites students to join her for hot breakfast at Quincy House on Fridays, 8:30-9:45 -- no special agenda; just a chance to chat about whatever is interesting

Olivia Pollak, teaching assistant (to learn more about Olivia, click here)

ohpollak@fas.harvard.edu

Nan Zhang, teaching fellow   (to learn more about Nan, click here)

nanzhang@g.harvard.edu

Note: Because we meet over the lunch period, students are welcome to bring something to eat

This course offers an opportunity to explore some of the unfinished business of modern-day mental health care, using an historical lens. Mental health matters! But history matters too, because understanding the forces that have brought us to our current moment arms us with insights that potentially allow us to do better.  

All readings and preparation instructions for each week are provided in the MODULES section of this Canvas website. Here, though, is a basic overview of our work together:

• Jan 29, 2026: What do we mean by unfinished business?

DIAGNOSTICS

• Feb 5, 2026: Making and unmaking diagnoses: spotlights on homosexuality and PTSD
• Feb 12, 2026: An elegy to the DSM: the rise and fall of psychiatry's diagnostic "Bible"

TREATMENTS

• Feb 19, 2026: How did talking become medicine?
• Feb 26, 2026: The arrival of drugs: selling the vision to doctors
• March 5, 2026: Am I normal? Legacies from an age of mental hygiene and maladjustment

EXPERIENCES 

• March 12, 2026: Experiences of anxiety and depression in an antidepressant era
• March 26 2026: Recovery narratives of manic-depression and schizophrenia
• March 27, 2026: Movie night: A Beautiful Mind (2001)

POLICY, POLITICS, and PROFIT

• April 2, 2026:  Why Big Pharma abandoned psychiatry and what (might) happen next
• April 9, 2026: Mental health matters in an age of corporate AI
• April 16, 2026: How prisons became the country's biggest provider of mental health care
• April 23, 2026: Stigma, perceived dangerousness, and inequity

Format

Class will normally be segmented into three 40-60 minute sections. We will usually begin with a mini-lecture (say, about 20 minutes) from Professor Harrington, designed to set us all up for a productive broad conversation about the issues of the week. Questions you all pose on the discussion board (see below) will serve to shape that conversation. The second section of class will normally  involve spotlighting one particularly salient issue , and will use a range of more interactive methods such as table-top small group work (say, responding to video material or a close reading of an assigned primary source). Finally, in the final 40 minutes or so of class, we will normally invite the students who undertook the mini-project for the week (see below) to help us begin to think about our own moment and what is at stake.

Outside of the normal class meeting times, I am hoping to schedule at least one evening film night and at least one special conversation with an expert guest, Professor Steven Hyman, who has witnessed profound changes in psychiatry over the years. If there is interest, I would consider adding additional conversations with outside experts; including dinner-time chats. We can discuss possibilities on the first day of class

Assignments

Oral assignments

• Group mini-projects: each week, small groups of students will undertake a modest amount of simple and guided research (using online sources, finding people to talk to, doing a bit of extra reading, etc.). They will then use their work to explicitly frame a final class conversation about our own moment -- and how we are helped by knowing more about the historical forces that created our moment.  Each of you will participate in two group mini-projects  (20%) -- NOTE: a list of suggested mini-projects is now available on the relevant assignment page: we will discuss these projects and make assignments the first week of class
• Discussion board postings and class participation: you are expected to use the discussion board regularly  (8-9) times over the semester) to post questions, share insights and flag things that confuse you in the week's unit. Plan to then come in and work with your peers and Professor Harrington to make sense of things -- basically, take your prep seriously and take full advantage of our weekly chance to talk and learn together (35%)

Written assignments

• Local history on mental health matters: You will use the archives of the Harvard Crimson to learn about ways that past Harvard College students  have been affected by challenges associated with changing questions and concerns  to do with mental health matters (10%)
• Intergenerational conversation:  You will conduct an interview with a family member, friend,  teacher, or faculty member who is of a different generation from yourself.  The goal of this project is to learn about another generation's personal perceptions of,  experiences with, and/or attitudes towards  mental illness, the mentally ill, mental suffering, or mental health care. (15%)
• Historically-informed policy brief on mental health matters:  You will identify a problem, use historical reasoning to explain how it came to be and how its origins matter, review ways that others have attempted to address it, and then argue for a specific intervention. (20%)