ABSTRACT
We begin at about the end of the eighteenth century with that epoch in history known as modernism. This is a period which sees the rise of philosophical and scientific rationalism together with their offspring, sociology, economics and psychology; a period in which religious thought is succeeded by secular, humanistic discourses. In psychiatry an entirely new concept of madness emerges and, for the first time, people are incarcerated by virtue of unreason, a state no longer considered to possess any virtue. It is the period in which the asylums-with attendant medicalisation-begin their growth (Foucault 1971).
