Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T05:04:05.125Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

9 - Mental Illness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2020

By
Andrew Scull
Edited by
Philippe Fontaine  and
Jefferson D. Pooley
Philippe Fontaine
Affiliation:
École normale supérieure Paris–Saclay
Jefferson D. Pooley
Affiliation:
Muhlenberg College, Pennsylvania
Get access

Summary

Chapter 9 traces the relatively light pre-World War II engagement with mental health issues, with the partial exception of sociology. The postwar expansion of federal research funding, paired with explosive treatment demand for returning veterans, transformed psychology, swelling its ranks with clinicians. Federal largesse underwrote a surprisingly diverse range of projects, with psychologists, psychiatrists, and, to a lesser degree, sociologists as the main beneficiaries. As psychology swelled under its postwar “scientist-practitioner” settlement, sociology remained comparatively small and, by the 1960s, increasingly critical of psychiatry and the country's mental health institutions. Meanwhile, psychiatry had rapidly shed its psychoanalytic character by the 1980s, a response to dried-up funding and the psychopharmacological revolution. The chapter addresses the relative neglect of mental health by economists, up through the 1990s-even as the discipline marched its toolkit through many other social problem domains. The explanation for the anomaly is that mental health, in all its stigmatized irrationality, was a step too far for a discipline committed to the everyday fact, and scholarly application, of reason. With its tight discipline and established policy sway, economists had “no need to chase after scraps from the table served up by NIMH.”

Keywords

Mental health policyasylumsdeinstitutionalizationpsychoanalysisfederal government and social scienceclinical psychologycommunity psychiatrybiology and mental illnesshistory of social science
Type
Chapter
Information
Society on the Edge
Social Science and Public Policy in the Postwar United States
 , pp. 322 - 357
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abbott, Andrew. The System of Professions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Addiction. “A Conversation with Christine Godfrey.” Addiction 108, no. 2 (2013): 257–64.Google Scholar
Arrow, Kenneth. “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care.” American Economic Review 53 (1963): 941–73.Google Scholar
Aviram, Uri, Syme, S. Leonard, and Cohen, Judith B.. “The Effects of Policies and Programs on the Reduction of Mental Hospitalization.” Social Science and Medicine 10, no. 11–12 (1976): 571–77.Google Scholar
Backhouse, Roger, and Fontaine, Philippe. “Introduction: History of Economics as History of Social Science.” In The Unsocial Social Science? Economics and Neighboring Disciplines since 1945, edited by Backhouse, Roger E. and Fontaine, Philippe, 1–21. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Backhouse, Roger, and Fontaine, Philippe. “Conclusions: The Identity of Economics – Image and Reality.” In The Unsocial Social Science? Economics and Neighboring Disciplines since 1945, edited by Backhouse, Roger E. and Fontaine, Philippe, 343–51. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Baker, David B., and Benjamin, Ludy T., Jr. “The Affirmation of the Scientist-Practitioner: A Look Back at Boulder.” American Psychologist 55, no. 2 (2000): 241–47.Google Scholar
Baker, David B., and Benjamin, Ludy T., Jr. “Creating a Profession: The National Institute of Mental Health and the Training of Psychologists, 1946–1954.” In Psychology and the National Institute of Mental Health, edited by Pickren, Wade E. and Schneider, Stanley, 181–207. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2005.Google Scholar
Becker, Gary S. “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach.” Journal of Political Economy 76 (1968): 169–217.Google Scholar
Becker, Gary S., and Murphy, Kevin M.. “A Theory of Rational Addiction.” Journal of Political Economy 96 (1988): 675–700.Google Scholar
Belknap, Ivan. Human Problems of a State Mental Hospital. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956.Google Scholar
Berkowitz, Edward. “The Politics of Mental Retardation during the Kennedy Administration.” Social Science Quarterly 61 (1980): 128–43.Google Scholar
Brand, Jeanne L., and Sapir, Philip. “An Historical Perspective on the National Institute of Mental Health.” Unpublished mimeograph, National Institute of Mental Health, 1964.Google Scholar
Bulmer, Martin. The Chicago School of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Bush, Vannevar. Science: The Endless Frontier. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1945.Google Scholar
Christianson, John Brian. “Capitation of Mental Health Care in Public Programs.” In Advances in Health Economics and Health Services Research, edited by Scheffler, Richard M. and Rossiter, Louis F., 281–311. Greenwich: JAI Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Chu, Franklin, and Trotter, Sharland. The Madness Establishment. New York: Grossman, 1984.Google Scholar
Devereux, Georges. Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of an American Plains Indian. New York: International Universities Press, 1969.Google Scholar
Dickey, Barbara, Cannon, Nancy L., McGuire, Thomas G., and Gudema, Jon E.. “The Quarterway House: A Two-Year Cost Study of an Experimental Residential Program.” Hospital and Community Psychiatry 37 (1986): 1136–43.Google Scholar
Dickey, Barbara, Binner, Paul R., Leff, Stephen, Uyeda, Mark K., Schlesinger, Mark J., and Gudeman, Jon E.. “Containing Mental Health Treatment Costs Through Program Design: A Massachusetts Study.” American Journal of Public Health 79, no. 7 (1989): 863–67.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dunham, H. Warren, and Weinberg, S. Kirson. The Culture of the State Mental Hospital. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1960.Google Scholar
Faris, Robert. Chicago Sociology: 1920–1932. San Francisco: Chandler, 1967.Google Scholar
Faris, Robert, and Dunham, H. Warren. Mental Disorders in Urban Areas: An Ecological Study of Schizophrenia and Other Psychoses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939.Google Scholar
Farreras, Ingrid. “Before Boulder: Professionalizing Clinical Psychology, 1896–1949.” PhD diss., University of New Hampshire, 2001.Google Scholar
Farreras, Ingrid. “The Historical Context for the National Institute of Mental Health Support of American Psychological Association Training and Accreditation Efforts.” In Psychology and the National Institute of Mental Health, edited by Pickren, Wade E. and Schneider, Stanley, 153–79. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2005.Google Scholar
Fein, Rashi. The Economics of Mental Illness. New York: Basic Books, 1958.Google Scholar
Fontaine, Philippe. “Walking the Tightrope: The Committee on the Behavioral Sciences and Academic Cultures at the University of Chicago, 1949–1955.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 52, no. 4 (2016): 349–70.Google Scholar
Frank, Richard G. “Regulatory Policy and Information Deficiencies in the Market for Mental Health Services.” Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law 14 (1989): 477–503.Google Scholar
Frank, Richard G., and Lave, J. R.. “The Effect of Benefit Design on the Length of Stay of Psychiatric Patients.” Journal of Human Resources 21 (1986): 321–37.Google Scholar
Frank, Richard G., and Manning, W. G., eds. Economics and Mental Health. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. Totem und Tabu. Leipzig: Heller, 1913.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Translated by Brill, A. A.. London: Routledge, 1919.Google Scholar
Geary, Daniel. “Economics and Sociology: From Complementary to Competing Perspectives.” In The Unsocial Social Science? Economics and Neighboring Disciplines since 1945, edited by Backhouse, Roger E. and Fontaine, Philippe, 291–314. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Gehrie, Mark J. “Psychoanalytic Anthropology: A Brief Review of the State of the Art.” American Behavioral Scientist 20 (1977): 721–32.Google Scholar
Gitre, Edward. “Importing Freud: First Wave Psychoanalysis, Interwar Social Sciences, and the Interdisciplinary Foundations of an American Social Theory.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 36 (2010): 239–62.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Doubleday, 1961.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. “The Insanity of Place.” Psychiatry 32 (1969): 357–88.Google Scholar
Gove, Walter R. “Societal Reaction as an Explanation for Mental Illness: An Evaluation.” American Sociological Review 35 (1970): 873–84.Google Scholar
Gove, Walter R., and Howell, Patrick. “Individual Resources and Mental Hospitalization: A Comparison of the Societal Reaction and Psychiatric Perspectives.” American Sociological Review 39, no. 1 (1974): 86–100.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Gary. The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry. New York: Plume, 2013.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Milton, Levinson, D. J., and Williams, R. H.. The Patient and the Mental Hospital. Glencoe: The Free Press, 1957.Google Scholar
Grob, Gerald. From Asylum to Community: Mental Health Policy in Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Gronfein, William. “Incentives and Intentions in Mental Health Policy: A Comparison of the Medicaid and Community Mental Health Programs.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 26 (1985): 192–206.Google Scholar
Gronfein, William. “Psychotropic Drugs and the Origins of Deinstitutionalization.” Social Problems 32 (1985): 437–54.Google Scholar
Hale, Nathan. The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Harris, Gardiner, “Talk Doesn't Pay so Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy.” The New York Times. March 5, 2011.Google Scholar
Healy, David. The Antidepressant Era. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Healy, David. The Creation of Psychopharmacology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Herman, Ellen. The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Hertzberg, David. Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Hollinger, David. “The Disciplines and the Identity Debates, 1970–1995.” Daedalus 16 (1997): 333–51.Google Scholar
Hollingshead, August, and Redlich, Frederick. Social Class and Mental Illness. New York: Wiley, 1958.Google Scholar
Horwitz, Allan, and Wakefield, Jerome. The Loss of Sadness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Horwitz, Allan, and Wakefield, Jerome. All We Have to Fear: Psychiatry's Transformation of Natural Anxieties into Mental Disorders. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Keeler, Emmett B., Manning, Willard G., and Wells, Kenneth B.. “The Demand for Episodes of Mental Health Services.” Journal of Health Economics 7 (1988): 369–92.Google Scholar
Kirk, Stuart, and Kutchins, Herb. The Selling of DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry. New York: de Gruyter, 1992.Google Scholar
Kirk, Stuart, and Thierren, Mark. “Community Mental Health Myths and the Fate of Formerly Hospitalized Patients.” Psychiatry 38 (1975): 209–17.Google Scholar
Kleinman, Arthur. Social Origins of Stress and Disease: Depression, Neurasthenia and Pain in Modern China. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Kolb, Lawrence C., Frazier, Shervert H., and Sirovatka, Paul. “The National Institute of Mental Health: Its Influence on Psychiatry and the Nation's Mental Health.” In American Psychiatry after the War, edited by Menninger, Roy W. and Nemiah, John C., 207–31. Washington: American Psychiatric Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Kroeber, Alfred L. “Totem and Taboo: An Ethnologic Psychoanalysis.” American Anthropologist 22 (1920): 48–55.Google Scholar
Kutchins, Herb, and Kirk, Stuart. Making Us Crazy: DSM: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders. New York: Free Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Lakoff, Andrew. Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Lambert, David A. “Political and Economic Determinants of Mental Health Regulations.” PhD diss., Brandeis University, 1985.Google Scholar
Leighton, Alexander H., Clausen, John A., and Wilson, Robert N.. Explorations in Social Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books, 1957.Google Scholar
Lerman, Paul. Deinstitutionalization and the Welfare State. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Levy, Robert A. Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.Google Scholar
Link, Bruce. “Mental Patient Status, Work, and Income: An Examination of the Effects of a Psychiatric Label.” American Sociological Review 47 (1982): 202–15.Google Scholar
Link, Bruce, Cullen, Francis, James, Frank, and Wozniack, John. “The Social Rejection of Former Mental Patients: Understanding Why Labels Matter.” American Journal of Sociology 92 (1987): 1461–500.Google Scholar
Luhrmann, Tanya. Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry. New York: Knopf, 2000.Google Scholar
MacDonald, Michael. Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Martin, Emily. Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
McGuire, Thomas G. “Research on Economics and Mental Health: The Past and Future Prospects.” In Economics and Mental Health, edited by Frank, Richard G. and Manning, Willard G., 1–14. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
McGuire, Thomas G., and Weisbrod, Burton A.. Economics and Mental Health. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1981.Google Scholar
Mills, C. Wright. “The Professional Ideology of Social Pathologists.” American Journal of Sociology 49 (1943): 165–80.Google Scholar
Mitchell, J. Psychiatrists’ Behavior under Mental Health Insurance Regulation. Needham: Health Economics Research, 1984.Google Scholar
Mojtabai, Ramin, and Olfson, Mark. “National Trends in Psychotherapy by Office-Based Psychiatrists.” Archives of General Psychiatry 65 (2008): 962–70.Google Scholar
Morgan, David. “Explaining Mental Illness.” European Journal of Sociology 16 (1975): 262–80.Google Scholar
Morgan, Mary S., and Rutherford, Malcolm. From Interwar Pluralism to Postwar Neoclassicism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Myers, Jerome K., and Roberts, Bertram H.. Family and Class Dynamics in Mental Illness. New York: Wiley, 1959.Google Scholar
Paris, Joel. The Fall of an Icon: Psychoanalysis and Academic Psychiatry. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Park, Robert, Burgess, Ernest, and McKenzie, Roderick D.. The City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925.Google Scholar
Perrucci, Robert. Circle of Madness: On Being Insane and Institutionalized in America. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974.Google Scholar
Pooley, Jefferson, and Solovey, Mark. “Marginal to the Revolution: The Curious Relationship between Economics and the Behavioral Sciences Movement in Mid-Twentieth Century America.” In The Unsocial Social Science? Economics and Neighboring Disciplines since 1945, edited by Backhouse, Roger E. and Fontaine, Philippe, 199–233. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Rennie, Thomas A., and Srole, Leo. “Social Class Prevalence and Distribution of Psychosomatic Conditions in an Urban Population.” Psychosomatic Medicine 18 (1956): 449–56.Google Scholar
Rice, Charles E. “The Research Grants Program of the National Institute of Mental Health and the Golden Age of American Academic Psychology.” In Psychology and the National Institute of Mental Health, edited by Pickren, Wade E. and Schneider, Stanley, 61–112. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2005.Google Scholar
Rice, Dorothy. The Economic Costs of Alcohol and Drug Abuse and Mental Illness. DHHS Publication Number (ADM) 90-1649. Rockville: US Department of Health and Human Services, 1990.Google Scholar
Rieder, Ronald O. “Hospitals, Patients, and Politics.” Schizophrenia Bulletin 1 (1974): 9–15.Google Scholar
Rose, Stephen. “Deciphering Deinstitutionalization: Complexities in Policy and Analysis.” Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 57, no. 4 (1979): 429–60.Google Scholar
Roth, Martin. “Psychiatry and Its Critics.” British Journal of Psychiatry 122 (1973): 373–78.Google Scholar
Rothman, David. The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order in the New Republic. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.Google Scholar
Samuelson, Paul. “Unemployment Ahead.” The New Republic 111, no. 11 (1944): 297–99.Google Scholar
Scheff, Thomas. Being Mentally Ill: A Sociological Theory. Chicago: Aldine, 1966.Google Scholar
Scheff, Thomas. Being Mentally Ill: A Sociological Theory. 3rd ed. New Brunswick: Aldine Transaction, 1999.Google Scholar
Schroeder, C. W. “Mental Disorders in Cities.” American Journal of Sociology 48, no. 1 (1942): 40–47.Google Scholar
Scull, Andrew. “The Decarceration of the Mentally Ill: A Critical View.” Politics and Society 6, no. 2 (1976): 173–212.Google Scholar
Scull, Andrew. Decarceration: Community Treatment and the Deviant: A Radical View. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1977.Google Scholar
Scull, Andrew. Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in Nineteenth Century England. London: Allen Lane, 1979.Google Scholar
Scull, Andrew. “Competing Perspectives on Deviance.” Deviant Behavior 5 (1984): 275–89.Google Scholar
Scull, Andrew. The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Scull, Andrew. “The Mental Health Sector and the Social Sciences in Post-World War II USA, Part II: The Impact of Federal Research Funding and the Drugs Revolution.” History of Psychiatry 22 (2011): 268–84.Google Scholar
Scull, Andrew. “Creating a New Psychiatry: On the Origins of Non-Institutional Psychiatry in the USA, 1900–1950.” History of Psychiatry 29, no. 4 (2018): 389–408.Google Scholar
Scull, Andrew. Psychiatry and Its Discontents. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Seligman, Martin. The Hope Circuit. London: Brealey, 2018.Google Scholar
Sharfstein, Steven S. “Big Pharma and American Psychiatry: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Psychiatric News 40 (2005): 3.Google Scholar
Shephard, Ben. A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Shorter, Edward. The Kennedy Family and the Story of Mental Retardation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Skocpol, Theda. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Spiro, Melford E. Oedipus in the Trobriands. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Spiro, Melford E. Culture and Human Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels. London: Motte, 1726.Google Scholar
Szasz, Thomas. The Myth of Mental Illness. New York: Hoeber-Harper, 1961.Google Scholar
Thoits, Peggy A. “Self-Labeling Processes in Mental Illness: The Role of Emotional Deviance.” American Journal of Sociology 92, no. 2 (1985): 221–49.Google Scholar
Windle, Charles, and Scully, Diana. “Community Mental Health Centers and Decreasing Use of State Hospitals.” Community Mental Health Journal 12 (1976): 239–43.Google Scholar
Wright, Rogers H., and Cummings, Nicholas A., eds. The Practice of Psychology: The Battle for Professionalism. Phoenix: Zeig, Tucker & Thiesen, 2001.Google Scholar
Yarrow, Marian R., Schwartz, Charlotte G., Murphy, Harriet S., and Deasy, Leila C.. “The Psychological Meaning of Mental Illness in the Family.” Journal of Social Issues 11, no. 4 (1955): 12–24.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×