History desk · reviewed
Mental health history, with the receipts attached
This history desk reconstructs specific decisions from dated records instead of turning the past into brand atmosphere. Each exhibit leads with the jurisdiction, time period, primary evidence, limits, and next source to inspect. The first exhibit follows the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 DSM decision through 1987. It can establish what institutions recorded and changed; it cannot compress every person’s experience or settle disputed causation. Start with the exhibit, then open the original records beside it.
Editorial charter
- Scope
- Bounded events in the history of mental health classification, care, rights, institutions, and practice. Dates and jurisdictions are explicit.
- Source order
- Original records and contemporary documents first; institutional archives second; peer-reviewed or National Academies synthesis for context; tertiary summaries only as discovery leads, never final authority.
- Attribution
- Every consequential claim points to a titled source with an access date. Quotations stay short and are attributed to the original speaker or document.
- Disputed claims
- Competing explanations remain visible. The page separates what a record proves from what it cannot prove and does not turn sequence into causation.
- Corrections
- Corrections change the visible review date and add a note identifying the claim, prior wording, replacement, evidence, and date.
- Prohibited conversion tactics
- No pop-up, countdown, lead form, member pitch, sales rail, fake urgency, or “find a therapist now” interruption appears inside an exhibit. A contextual directory link is allowed only when it helps answer the reader’s next question.
Flagship exhibit · 1952–1987 · United States
What changed when homosexuality came out of the DSM?
The American Psychiatric Association's December 1973 action removed homosexuality itself from DSM-II, but it did not erase the diagnostic legacy in one step. A narrower replacement remained, the membership referendum followed in 1974, and a related diagnosis persisted until 1987.
History of the Mind
A series on how people have understood the mind, from the oldest skulls onward. Every page lists its sources and the date it was checked.
Part I — Before Written History
- How Did the Human Brain Evolve? What Skulls Can Tell Us, and What They Can't
- Brains of Earlier Hominins: Did Walking Come Before Big Brains?
- Neanderthal Minds: What Bones, Tools and DNA Can Tell Us, and What They Can't
- How Did Language Begin?
- How Did Humans Start Thinking in Symbols?
- What Can Cave Art Tell Us About Ancient Minds?
- Burial Before Writing: What the Oldest Graves Can and Can't Tell Us
- Ancient Trauma: What Old Bones Can Tell Us, and What They Can't
- Were Early Humans Violent or Cooperative?
- Living in Groups Before Writing: How Big, Who Was In Them, and How We Know
- The Evolution of Fear: Old Alarms, New Arguments
- Where Did Attachment Come From?
- Why Do Human Babies Need So Much Help?
- Did Early Humans Form Pair Bonds?
- Are Humans Really "Tribal"? What the Evidence Says About "Us" and "Them"
- Did People Dream Before Writing?
- Altered States Before Writing: What Can the Evidence Tell Us?
- Did People Use Mind-Altering Plants Before Writing?
- Ritual Before Writing: How Do You Spot a Ceremony Nobody Wrote Down?
- Music and the Brain: What Can the Oldest Flutes Tell Us?
- Why Do Humans Tell Stories?
Part II — Ancient Explanations of the Mind
- Ancient Greece and the Mind: A Long Argument, Not One Answer
- Ancient Iran and the Mind: Choice, Soul, and Healing in the Oldest Sources
- Soul, Spirit, and the Noonday Demon: Early Christian Ideas About the Mind
- Heart, Brain, and Floating Person: Minds in Islamic Civilizations
- Hindu Philosophical Traditions and the Mind: Who's Driving the Chariot?
- Heart, Qi, and Spirit: What China's Medical Classics Said About the Mind
- Heart-Mind, Feeling, and Order: Early Chinese Thinkers on the Mind
Part III — East, West, and Everything Between
- Greek and Indian Ideas of the Mind: Two Chariots, Different Riders
- Is There a Self? Buddhist and Western Answers
- Feelings in the Body: Chinese Medical Classics and Greek Humors
- Hospitals, Jinn, and Saints: Madness in the Medieval Islamic World and Europe
- How Meditation Entered Modern Psychology: A History of Borrowing and Change
- Community Care and Psychiatric Institutions: More Than a Pendulum
- Spiritual or Biological? Why the Historical Choice Is Too Simple
- Individualism, Collectivism and the Limits of a Country Score
Part IV — People Who Changed How We Understand the Mind
- Hippocrates: A Physician, a Collection and a Complicated Legacy
- Galen: The Brain, the Body and the Power of an Argument
- Plato: Why We Can Want More Than One Thing
- Aristotle: What Makes a Living Thing Alive?
- Socrates: Questions That Expose What We Do Not Know
- Avicenna: Sensing, Remembering and Knowing Yourself
- Al-Razi: Learning from Books and Questioning Them
- Descartes: Doubting, Thinking and Living in a Body
- Locke: Where Ideas Come From
- Hume: Why We Expect the World to Keep Its Patterns
- Darwin: Studying Minds Across Species
- Broca: What a Case Report Can—and Cannot—Show
- Wernicke: Language Needs Connections
- Phineas Gage: A Person Behind a Famous Record
- William James: Following the Stream of Thought
- Ivan Pavlov: Studying Signals in the Laboratory
- Emil Kraepelin: How a Classification Took Shape
- Sigmund Freud: Reading a Changing Theory of Mind
- Carl Jung: Patterns, Types and the Problem of Evidence
- Alfred Adler: A Person in a Social World
- John B. Watson: What Should Psychology Observe?
- B. F. Skinner: Behavior, Consequences and Private Experience
- Jean Piaget: How Does Knowledge Take Shape?
- Lev Vygotsky: Thinking with Words, Tools and Other People
- Anna Freud: Defenses, Childhood and the Work of Observation
For the wider chronology, continue to the nine-era Archive. Its job is orientation; the exhibits do the narrower source work.