From the second half of the Nineteenth Century, pathological protesting was identified as a psychiatric problem as well as a menace to society. In this paper, I will explore how the concept paranoia querulans was put to work in the categorization of certain troublesome people, legitimizing their confinement in mental institutions, in Sweden in the 1930s and 40s.

Diagnosing paranoic querulants was not just about sorting some people out as a distinct category within the greater category of the mentally ill. It was also about distinguishing them from people who were excessively angry, quarrelsome or even violent, but not pathologically so. The difficulty of distinguishing mental health from insanity took a certain twist in the case of "real" querulants, who were categorized as such on the criteria of appearing quite sane, except for their inordinate fixation on some wrong purportedly done to them.

Somewhat paradoxically too, the kind of behaviour that used to motivate the confinement of querulants - speaking one's mind by writing letters to authorities - also served as the key to their release. In a way, the querulant could be seen as a person who very actively exercised her civic duty. From the perspective of the modern, recently democratized state, all citizens ought to be formed, or preferably form themselves, into self-governing, productive subjects. Buried within this ideal, however, lay the implication that people should conduct themselves in directions that were beneficial for society. The querulant, in contrast, steered herself in the wrong direction, or just too aggressively. Obviously, there were borders where good citizenship turned bad, excessive and ugly - even crazy. But how were these borders drawn in practice?

In the interwar years, as well as today, psychiatric care aimed at social control and protection. At the same time, society had an interest in discharging psychiatric patients, on trial or permanently, for medical as well as economic reasons.

The case files that I study in this project make it possible to scrutinize querulousness and processes of negotiation from the patients' perspective as well as the doctors' and the authorities', and therefore examine power as a complex, relational phenomenon.