Historical Perspectives on Mental Health and Psychiatry Introduction In the period from the 1960s to the 2010s, there are six major shifts in encounters between professionals and their patients. They are: deinstitutionalization, antipsychiatry, patients' movements, changes in diagnostic nomenclature, evidence-based medicine, and the privileging of psychopharmacology, neurochemistry, and neurobiology. These themes overlap to varying degrees. Linked to these changes are major shifts in the care of older people with mental health issues, the 'treatment' of homosexuals, debates about informed consent, the 'medicalisation' of everyday complains, and shifts from psychosocial models of psychiatry to biomedical ones