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This paper outlines the recent history of LGBT psychology and psychotherapy in the United Kingdom, focusing on key publications, and the current terrain, highlighting similarities and differences between the UK and the US contexts. The paper is divided into four sections: the first focuses on the early development of the field in the late 1960s. The second section explores the 1980s--a decade that witnessed the publication of two key texts that had a strong influence on the development of the field and, in particular, on the development of critical and discursive approaches. The third section details the rapid changes that occurred in the 1990s including the establishment of a Lesbian and Gay Psychology Section within the British Psychological Society. The final section considers the current terrain and the similarities and differences in the theoretical commitments of researchers and practitioners working in the UK and in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arius Didymus or the Warlike Twin, as his Greek name might be rendered is not one of the more familiar figures in the history of ancient philosophy. When the author was invited to contribute a paper on Arius, the only thing he knew about him was that some interesting fragments were collected under his name in author H. Diels' Doxographi Graeci, including the most authentic version of Heraclitus' famous remark about the river. Perhaps one positive result of the present group of papers may be the realization that Arius deserves an edition of his own, even if such an edition is composed by photographic reprint of the relevant texts from Diels and Ipke Wachsmuth.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the etymological roots of the words "communication" and "information." In so doing, the paper demonstrates a connection between the two concepts and their evolution. It seems reasonable to suggest that the tieing together of diverse cognitive phenomena via an organizing category, otherwise referred to as information, reflects a linguistic evolution carried out over thousands of years, and reaching its current meaning only recently: I suggest that the idea of information, that is, the social attitude which considers information an abstract essence and treats it as a thing, has historical antecedents which are quite old, although the actual tendency to treat information as if it were a physical object seems to have arisen in the eighteenth century. Moreover, there appears to be a close link between the entry and development of the concepts of information and communication in the English language, resulting in overlapping meanings and parallel variations. Since the idea of information emerged from historical and cultural processes, and since communication behavior is also a product of cultural history, the overlap between the two phenomena bears deeper exploration. However, the overlap has fallen into the blindspot between the two fields which should exhibit the greatest interest; so that communication researchers have mostly focused on communication processes, while information scientists have mostly concerned themselves with information structures. Thus, if both communication and information reflect cultural and historical processes, perhaps even the same processes, then convergence on a new research front offers significant potential, even so much as to suggest the possibility of a unified theory of information and communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1905, Massachusetts General Hospital initiated the first medical social work program in the United States. Based on the writings of its leaders, this paper presents the early history of medical social work in the United States. Inspired by developments in European health care that emphasized the community context of disease, medical social work pioneers saw a need to individualize the patient while also promoting public health measures in the community, improving the patient's environment to eliminate the causes of disease. In addition, since they served patients because of their diseases rather than their poverty, medical social workers were among the first to provide social work services to the non-poor. In spite of their emphasis on environmental change, many of early medical social work leaders had all anti-institutional bias; they were suspicious of large-scale solutions for what they saw as fundamentally individual problems. Consequently, methods for promoting individual adaptation developed more rapidly than methods for promoting environmental change. Ironically, the medicalization of social problems in contemporary times has resulted in a focus on individual pathology rather than social and lifestyle causation in health, even as the rising cost and complexity of the system challenges health care consumers in the United States. Reaffirming the environmental emphasis of medical social work pioneers provides a way for today's health care social workers to incorporate environmental modification into their practice and promote the health of all citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter discusses the nature of mental disorder as a historical phenomenon. Some authors, mainly academic psychiatrists, have attempted to get to grips with the diagnostic systems of psychiatry from the point of view of their historical development. For example, P. Pichot in 1994 has described the temporal development of psychiatric diagnoses, dating the birth of the modern diagnostic system to one hundred years ago with the work of Kraepelin. The problems which surround the debate about historical relativity versus continuity of psychiatric descriptive terms are variously grasped by different authors. In a series of papers G. E. Berrios from 1984 to 1985, displays great scholarship in his depiction of changes in psychiatric diagnoses and their associated psychopathological theorising. His survey of the whole field of change in psychopathological thinking in Europe over the past two centuries is brilliant, as is the scope of his detailed description of changes in the psychopathology of affectivity and his analysis of terminological changes in the description of obsessional disorder. The history of psychiatry has as yet shown only passing interest in the way in which past conceptions of mental disorder may have shaped both the experience of, as well as social responses to it. Perhaps part of the reason for this is the paucity of historical sources on the experience of mental disorder in past ages.