The history of psychiatry is a history of the difference between "normal" and "crazy". However, this difference is becoming increasingly fragile. On the one hand, the crazy gains an everyday normality, starting with the opening of psychiatric institutions and the integration of inmates into society up to the new buzzword of neurodiversity. On the other hand, behaviors and reactions like intoxication, stress or attention deficit are pathologized and become subject of psychiatric interventions.

In this way, previously established narratives of the historiography of psychiatry lose their interpretative power, which is owed to the very dichotomy that is currently being called into question. This is where our interdisciplinary research group comes in. It does not attempt to trace a change in the concepts of madness, but to mobilize these opposing tendencies as a resource for contemporary history. Thus, it wants to design a psychiatric contemporary history along the lines of an "anthropology of the present" that also subjects contemporary interpretive schemes of normal#crazy worlds to historical analysis.