Mental Illness Becomes Ubiquitous

Abstract

The quarter century that ran roughly from Freud’s death in 1939 through the mid-1960s featured a growing number of conditions seen as indicating mental illness and needing professional mental health care. A variety of factors contributed to this expansion of pathology. Some of these involved developments within psychiatry, whose mandate enlarged to the extent that, as a president of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute reflected: “Scarcely any human problem admits of solution other than psychoanalysis.” Another source of the growing range of disorders was the radical reshaping of concepts of normality and abnormality that emerged from the experiences of military psychiatrists during World War II. After the war, a newly activist federal government turned its attention to the mental health of entire populations, not just identified patients. At the same time, the transformation of the primary locus of psychiatric treatment from inpatient institutions to outpatient practices mandated a sweeping revision of psychiatry’s system of classifying mental illnesses to encompass many more conditions. Psychoactive drug treatments, too, expanded to attract a huge proportion of Americans; the current templates for anxiolytic, antidepressant, and antipsychotic drugs all arose in the 1950s.