A special issue of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry dedicated to “Psychiatry as Social Medicine” may interest AHP readers. Full details below.

“Introduction to Special Issue: Psychiatry as Social Medicine,” Anne Kveim Lie & Jeremy Greene. No Abstract.

“The Most Social of Maladies: Re-Thinking the History of Psychiatry From the Edges of Empire,” Claire Edington. Open Access. Abstract:

This paper argues that the colonial experience was never just “out there” but was a constitutive feature of the global development of psychiatry and, indeed, of social medicine itself. I show how regional knowledge about psychiatry, produced in scientific exchanges across colonial Southeast Asia over four decades and culminating with the 1937 Bandung Conference, became part of new international approaches to health care in rural areas, and later, in developing nations. In particular, I discuss how the embrace of the agricultural colony as a solution to the problem of asylum overcrowding occurred at the same moment that colonial public health experts and officials were moving away from expensive, technocratic fixes to address indigenous health needs. Yet in the search for alternatives to institutionalized care, including forms of family and community support, colonial psychiatrists were increasingly drawn into unpredictable and unwieldy networks of care and economy. Drawing on research from Vietnam, this paper decenters the asylum so as to recast the history of colonial and postcolonial psychiatry as integral to the history of social medicine and global health. The paper then returns to Bandung in 1955, the site of another famous meeting in the history of Third World solidarity, to consider how the embrace of the “Bandung spirit” may provide new avenues for decolonizing the history of colonial and postcolonial psychiatry.

“Transcultural Psychiatry: Cultural Difference, Universalism and Social Psychiatry in the Age of Decolonisation,” Ana Anti?. Open Access. Abstract:

n the spring of 1962, a series of alarming headlines greeted American newspaper readers. From “New York Living for Nuts Only” and “One in Five Here Mentally Fit” to “Scratch a New Yorker, and What Do You Find?” and “City Gets Mental Test, Results are Real Crazy,” the stories highlighted the shocking and, to some, incredible statistics that fewer than one in five (18.5%) Manhattanites had good mental health. Approximately a quarter of them had such bad mental health that they were effectively incapacitated, often unable to work or function socially. The headlines were gleaned from Mental Health in the Metropolis (1962), the first major output of the Midtown Manhattan Study, a large-scale, interdisciplinary project that surveyed the mental health of 1660 white Upper East Side residents between the ages of 20 and 59. One of the most significant social psychiatry projects to emerge following the Second World War, the Midtown Manhattan Study endeavored to “test the general hypothesis that biosocial and sociocultural factors leave imprints on mental health which are discernible when viewed from the panoramic perspective provided by a large population.” Despite initial media and academic interest, however, the Midtown Manhattan Study’s findings were soon forgotten, as American psychiatry turned its focus to individual—rather than population—psychopathology, and turned to the brain—rather than the environment—for explanations. Relying on archival sources, contemporary medical and social scientific literature, and oral history interviews, this article explains why the Midtown Manhattan Study failed to become more influential, concluding that its emphasis on the role of social isolation and poverty in mental illness should be taken more seriously today.

“Getting On in Gotham: The Midtown Manhattan Study and Putting the “Social” in Psychiatry,” Matthew Smith. Open Access. Abstract:

n the spring of 1962, a series of alarming headlines greeted American newspaper readers. From “New York Living for Nuts Only” and “One in Five Here Mentally Fit” to “Scratch a New Yorker, and What Do You Find?” and “City Gets Mental Test, Results are Real Crazy,” the stories highlighted the shocking and, to some, incredible statistics that fewer than one in five (18.5%) Manhattanites had good mental health. Approximately a quarter of them had such bad mental health that they were effectively incapacitated, often unable to work or function socially. The headlines were gleaned from Mental Health in the Metropolis (1962), the first major output of the Midtown Manhattan Study, a large-scale, interdisciplinary project that surveyed the mental health of 1660 white Upper East Side residents between the ages of 20 and 59. One of the most significant social psychiatry projects to emerge following the Second World War, the Midtown Manhattan Study endeavored to “test the general hypothesis that biosocial and sociocultural factors leave imprints on mental health which are discernible when viewed from the panoramic perspective provided by a large population.” Despite initial media and academic interest, however, the Midtown Manhattan Study’s findings were soon forgotten, as American psychiatry turned its focus to individual—rather than population—psychopathology, and turned to the brain—rather than the environment—for explanations. Relying on archival sources, contemporary medical and social scientific literature, and oral history interviews, this article explains why the Midtown Manhattan Study failed to become more influential, concluding that its emphasis on the role of social isolation and poverty in mental illness should be taken more seriously today.

“Assembling Adjustment: Parergasia, Paper Technologies, and the Revision of Recovery,” Michael N. Healey. Abstract:

Drawing from research on ‘paper technologies’ conducted by medical historians Volker Hess and Andrew Mendelsohn, among others, this article explores how Adolf Meyer (1866–1950) and his staff at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic used customized punch cards to develop an alternative conceptualization of schizophrenia: ‘parergasia.’ It begins by examining ‘dementia praecox,’ the conceptual precursor to both schizophrenia and parergasia, to explain how earlier paper technologies used to track patients transferred to asylums generated prognostic assumptions that precluded deinstitutionalization and community-based care. It then describes how Meyer’s staff modified these technologies to define parergasia in opposition to dementia praecox and other diagnoses that resulted in prolonged hospitalization, primarily by conducting follow-up studies on discharged patients that correlated outcomes with various social factors. After demonstrating how the standardized forms used in these studies limited the possible metrics of recovery, it concludes by suggesting how Meyer’s research influenced leaders of the community mental health movement, and prefigured later trends in psychiatric services.

“Psychosis Without Meaning: Creating Modern Clinical Psychiatry, 1950 to 1980,” Joel T. Braslow. Open Access. Abstract:

Over the last fifty years, American psychiatrists have embraced psychotropic drugs as their primary treatment intervention. This has especially been the case in their treatment of patients suffering from psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. This focus has led to an increasing disregard for patients’ subjective lived-experiences, life histories, and social contexts. This transformation of American psychiatry occurred abruptly beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s. My essay looks the ways these major transformations played themselves out in everyday clinical practices of state hospital psychiatrists from 1950 to 1980. Using clinical case records from California state hospitals, I chronicle the ways institutional and ideological forces shaped the clinical care of patients with psychotic disorders. I show there was an abrupt rupture in the late 1960s, where psychiatrists’ concerns about the subjective and social were replaced by a clinical vision focused on a narrow set of drug-responsive signs and symptoms. Major political, economic, and ideological shifts occurred in American life and social policy that provided the context for this increasingly pharmacocentric clinical psychiatry, a clinical perspective that has largely blinded psychiatrists to their patients’ social and psychological suffering.

“Society as Cause and Cure: The Norms of Transgender Social Medicine,” Ketil Slagstad. Open Access. Abstract:

This article analyzes how trans health was negotiated on the margins of psychiatry from the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this period, a new model of medical transition was established for trans people in Norway. Psychiatrists and other medical doctors as well as psychologists and social workers with a special interest and training in social medicine created a new diagnostic and therapeutic regime in which the social aspects of transitioning took center stage. The article situates this regime in a long Norwegian tradition of social medicine, including the important political role of social medicine in the creation of the postwar welfare state and its scope of addressing and changing the societal structures involved in disease. By using archival material, medical records and oral history interviews with former patients and health professionals, I demonstrate how social aspects not only underpinned diagnostic evaluations but were an integral component of the entire therapeutic regime. Sex reassignment became an integrative way of imagining and practicing psychiatry as social medicine. The article specifically unpacks the social element of these diagnostic and therapeutic approaches in trans medicine. Because the locus of intervention and treatment remained the individual, an approach with subversive potential ended up reproducing the norms that caused illness in the first place: “the social” became a conformist tool to help the patient integrate, adjust to and transform the pathology-producing forces of society.

“Before and After Prozac: Psychiatry as Medicine, and the Historiography of Depression,” Jonathan Sadowsky. Abstract:

This article examines the historiography of depression, with an eye to illuminating wider issues in the social study of psychiatry and depression. It argues that the advent of Prozac caused notable shifts in how scholars in the looked at depression. Far from solidifying the medical status of depression and psychiatry’s treatment of it, the spread of pill-oriented depression treatment strengthened social researchers’ emphasis on psychiatry’s social nature. The article further argues that a depiction of psychiatry as mainly a social phenomenon both unduly diminishes its status as medicine, and implicitly underestimates the social in the rest of medicine. This matters if people can benefit from psychiatric treatment. Put another way, if people taking psychiatric medications are indeed ill, and taking medicines that can help them, social analysis should acknowledge this, even as it rightly investigates psychiatry as embedded in social and cultural contexts, as all of medicine is. Doing so means treating psychiatry, whatever its limitations, as a kind of medicine, not as a special case.

“Concluding Remarks,” Arthur Kleinman. No Abstract.