Thesis analyzes history of psychiatric discourse in Croatian society at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century. The time period covered by this research starts in 1879, the year Royal and Land Asylum for the Insane in Stenjevec was opened as the first psychiatric institution in Croatian part of Austria-Hungary and it ends in 1918. Theoretical and methodological approach is based upon the constructivist school of history of psychiatry which assumes that medical perspectives of mind and mental health were necessarily informed by specific historical context, institutional practices of psychiatry and dominant emotional regimes present in society. In the analysis of sources methodological apparatus of the history of emotions and the cultural history of psychiatry was used. Psychiatric discourse was inseparable from psychiatric practice and developed in constant communication between psychiatrists and inmates of psychiatric institutions, and psychiatrists and other social institutions and individuals: judicial authorities, local administrative authorities, families of inmates and other physicians. Sources for the description and analysis of this network of relationships are psychiatric articles and books, as well as the patient histories kept in the archives of the Vrapče Psychiatric Clinic. Based on these sources, the development and emergence of Croatian psychiatry in the context of European intellectual movements of the second half of the nineteenth century is analyzed, especially given the prevailing evolutionary and somaticist theories and narratives of degeneration and primitivism, closely related to scientific racism. The living conditions of the asylum inmates and the therapeutic methods applied in the institution are described. Particular attention is paid to the place of gender, sexuality, fear, and conflict in psychiatric discourse. Discourses around these concepts form an essential part of the narrative of mental illness in the nineteenth century, and the psychiatric approach to these concepts is analyzed by a dense description of a series of medical histories. In the analysis, a prominent place is given to voices of the inmates. The medical study of their statements was crucial for the formation of psychiatric knowledge, although psychiatry at the time treated their speech ambivalently. On the one hand, it was carefully written down, on the other hand, it was delegitimized as "madman's speech", and the inmates were deprived of any right to explain and interpret their own symptoms.