In the United States during the early 1980s, hundreds of day care providers were accused of sexually abusing their young charges in satanic rituals that included blood drinking, cannibalism, and human sacrifice. The panic surrounding the ritual abuse of children has spread quickly to Canada, Europe, and Australasia, and its rapid dispersion has been unimpeded by international investigations that found no evidence to corroborate the allegations and warned that a moral panic was thrusting them into professional public attention. This work is a sociologically based analysis of the day care...

"Madness" is, of course, personally experienced, but because of its intimate relationship to the sociocultural context, it is also socially constructed, culturally represented and socially controlled--all of which make it a topic rife for sociological analysis. Using a range of historical and contemporary textual material, this work exercises the sociological imagination to explore some of the most perplexing questions in the history of madness, including why some behaviors, thoughts and emotions are labeled mad while others are not; why they are labeled mad in one historical period and not...

The mentally ill have always been with us, but once confined in institutions their treatment has not always been of much interest or concern. This work makes a case for why it should be. It reveals how therapeutics have always been embedded in their particular social and historical moment, and how they have linked extant medical knowledge, practitioner skill and the expectations of patients who experienced their own disorders in different ways.