
Professor Matthew Smith
History
Prize And Awards
- AHRC/Medical Humanities Award (Best Research) - shortlisted
- Recipient
- 2021
- Griffin Award
- Recipient
- 2020
- Prose Awards (Honorable Mention) for Another Person's Poison: A History of Food Allergy
- Recipient
- 2016
- Member, Young Academy of Scotland
- Recipient
- 1/6/2014
- AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker
- Recipient
- 2012
- Pressman-Burroughs Wellcome Career Development Award
- Recipient
- 2010
Publications
- Historical and social science perspectives on food allergy
- Smith Matthew
- Clinical and Experimental Allergy Vol 53, pp. 902-910 (2023)
- https://doi.org/10.1111/cea.14360
- Psychiatric epidemiology and the Chicago School of Sociology
- Smith Matthew
- History of Psychiatry Vol 35, pp. 11-29 (2024)
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0957154X231206510
- The First Resort : The History of Social Psychiatry in the United States
- Smith Matthew
- (2023)
- Getting on in Gotham : the midtown Manhattan study and putting the social in psychiatry
- Smith Matthew
- Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry Vol 45, pp. 385-404 (2021)
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-021-09751-4
- "Snips and snails and puppy dog tails" : Boys and behaviour in the USA
- Smith Matthew
- Canadian Bulletin of Medical History Vol 36, pp. 51-79 (2019)
- https://doi.org/10.3138/cbmh.236-112017
- Preventing Mental Illness : Past, Present and Future
- Kritsotaki Despo, Long Vicky, Smith Matthew
- Mental Health in Historical Perspective Mental Health in Historical Perspective (2018)
Teaching
I am happy to supervise a variety of MRes and PhD projects in the history of health and medicine. These include mental health and psychiatry, food and nutrition, allergy and immunology and child health. I am also happy to consider supervision of other topics examining the history of health and medicine in Canada, the United States and Scotland. Please get in touch if you have a research idea!
I teach on a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate classes, focussing primarily on the history of health and medicine, but also North American history. My specialist courses include Madness and Society from Ancient Times to the Present; The Price of Health: The UK, US and Canada since 1800; and Food and Health in the West in the Twentieth Century. In addition, I have taught on Disease and Society, USA History, Historiography, Cultures of Empire, Glasgow: History, Culture and Identity and other classes.
Research Interests
When do certain behavioural characteristics become a psychiatric disorder? How do we know what foods are healthy for us? Why have rates of food allergy and intolerance escalated in recent years? What are the root causes of mental illness? My research involves analysing questions such as these from a historical perspective not only in the interest of charting our past, but also in the hopes of informing our future.
Professional Activities
- Health and Care Futures: thematic areas workshop
- Participant
- 30/5/2024
- Examination of PhD at the University of Cambridge
- Examiner
- 2024
- Examination of a PhD at the University of Edinburgh
- Examiner
- 2024
- Examination of a PhD at Johns Hopkins University
- Examiner
- 2024
- Free Thinking
- Recipient
- 13/6/2023
- PhD Examination - University of Warwick
- Examiner
- 14/3/2023
Projects
- An Ounce of Prevention: A History of Social Psychiatry, 1939-Present
- Smith, Matthew (Fellow)
- "In 2010 I attended an international conference, entitled 'The Social Determinants of Mental Health' and held in Chicago. Its focus was to address the socioeconomic factors, ranging from poverty to violence, believed to cause mental illness. The participants, including David Satcher, the former US Surgeon General, not only advocated a more socially-informed approach to understanding mental health, but also wanted to launch a political movement that would place prevention at the heart of mental health policy and clinical practice.
Such an approach to mental health was not new, but its history has not been written and so was unknown to most of the conference participants. Building on the mental hygiene and child guidance movements of the early twentieth century, and reaching its peak during the 1950s and 1960s, the psychiatric and political movement known as social psychiatry similarly advocated a preventive approach to mental illness, which stressed alleviating social deprivation and inequality. But, although social psychiatry would become a major force within American psychiatry and politics, influencing both presidents of the American Psychiatric Association and the legislation of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, it faded away in the subsequent decades, as biological approaches to mental illness became the dominant force in American psychiatry.
Given the World Health Organisation's recent warnings that mental illness will become the world's most common malady within twenty years (Mental Health Atlas, 2011) - not to mention the escalating social and economic cost of such conditions - it is not surprising that preventive approaches to mental illness are again attracting attention. This project seeks not only to analyse a neglected chapter in the historiography of psychiatry, but also to inform current attempts to address the social determinants of mental health by examining the successes and failures of social psychiatry.
The project is divided into three sections. The first examines the intellectual origins of social psychiatry, including its roots in the mental hygiene and child guidance movements of the early twentieth century. Widespread interest in social psychiatry escalated not only because it addressed concerns about the rising rates of mental illness, but also because it represented an interdisciplinary collaboration between psychiatrists and social scientists that inspired a wide audience in academic and public policy circles. The project will address the historical factors involved in this cooperation, and assess both the benefits and disadvantages of such an interdisciplinary approach to mental health. The second section of the project examines the zenith of social psychiatry, as it threatened to eclipse psychoanalysis and biological psychiatry (which stressed neurological explanations of and pharmaceutical treatments for mental illness) during the 1960s. Unfortunately for social psychiatrists, however, the interest in preventive approaches waned during the 1970s and 1980s, as psycho-pharmacology became more popular amongst both psychiatrists and their patients, and economic and political pressures deflated the socially progressive zeal of American politicians and mental health professionals. The third section of the project will examine not only the decline of social psychiatry, but also explore why preventive approaches to mental illness have once again found favour in both the US and elsewhere." - 01-Jan-2014 - 31-Jan-2017
- Preventing Mental Illness Past Present and Future Witness Seminar
- Smith, Matthew (Principal Investigator)
- 01-Jan-2016 - 31-Jan-2016
- Health History in Action : The Society for the Social History of Medicine Postgraduate Career Development Workshop and Conference
- Smith, Matthew (Principal Investigator)
- 01-Jan-2015 - 31-Jan-2015
- DSM-5 and the Future of Psychiatric Diagnosis
- Smith, Matthew (Academic)
- 06-Jan-2014 - 08-Jan-2014
- One Person's Food is Another's Poison: Food Allergy in the Twentieth Century - Fellowship
- Smith, Matthew (Principal Investigator)
- 05-Jan-2011 - 04-Jan-2012
- Mental Health Futures Collaborative
- Cogan, Nicola (Principal Investigator) Parra Rodriguez, Mario (Principal Investigator) Fleming, Leanne (Principal Investigator) Quinn, Neil (Principal Investigator) Tse, Dwight (Principal Investigator) Knifton, Lee (Principal Investigator) McCann, Lisa (Principal Investigator) Maguire, Roma (Principal Investigator) Smith, Matthew (Principal Investigator) Graham, Christopher Darryl (Principal Investigator) Grealy, Madeleine (Principal Investigator) Stephen, Susan (Principal Investigator) Weir, Natalie Mcfadyen (Principal Investigator) Donnachie, Craig (Principal Investigator) Cameron, Julie (Principal Investigator) Kane, Tony (Co-investigator) Lakey, Trevor (Academic) Donovan, Kevin (Fellow)
- This Engage with Strathclyde event is aimed at all those with an interest in mental health including people with lived experience, NHS and social care personnel and staff, occupational health and human resource management staff, student support services, university student and staff, academics, private and public sector and other personnel interested in mental health research and knowledge exchange.
- 12-Jan-2023 - 12-Jan-2023