[Labour, silence and order: visualizing modern psychiatry--strategies for legitimizing Swiss asylum psychiatry in the context of occupational therapy in the interwar period].

In the 1930s Swiss psychiatrists were engaged in a singular public campaign to promote a new image of their profession. The result of this campaign was a series of booklets about psychiatric institutions. These asylum-monographs, as they were called, encompassed a large number of photographic illustrations, most of which showed patients at work. Taking the visual omnipresence of patients' work in the asylum-monographs as a starting point, this contribution examines the status of occupational therapy in psychiatric discourse and practice in Switzerland at the beginning of the 1930s. The first part of the contribution describes and outlines the development of patients' work in several psychiatric institutions after World War I. Then it turns to the discussion about the introduction of a new and more active form of occupational therapy ("aktivere Therapie") in this period. The second part of the contribution analyzes the meanings of therapeutic work in psychiatric discourse. It shows that the enthusiasm occupational therapy produced among Swiss psychiatrists was mainly due to its ability to change the visual appearance of the asylums. Furthermore it points to several traits of Eugen Bleuler's concept of schizophrenia, especially the assumption of different ranks of primary and secondary symptoms and the notion of autism, which were both crucial to the contemporary understanding and handling of occupational therapy. Finally, it argues that a medical interpretation of patients' work, which identified therapy with working discipline, was a necessary precondition for the omnipresence of patients' work in Swiss psychiatry's public campaign in the 1930s.