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Preventing Mental Illness pp 187–207Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

American Psychiatry in Transition: Reform or Revolution?

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Part of the book series: Mental Health in Historical Perspective ((MHHP))

Abstract

During the late 1960s psychiatry in the United States began to replicate the unrest in society at large and activism was a significant facet of that development. Just as widespread social movements across the country focused on the Vietnam War, civil rights for blacks and the advancement of feminism, there was also unrest among the nation’s mental health practitioners. Reform and revolutionary ideas characterised the therapists who sought change in American mental health. Radical psychiatry was aimed at preventing overdiagnosis, improving outmoded practices and tackling mental health by curing a ‘sick society’. But was this reform or revolution? This chapter showcases several debates about change in American psychiatry. It highlights that there was agreement on the need to transform psychiatry, yet few saw eye to eye on what that meant and how it was to be done.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Jerome Agel, ed., The Radical Therapist: The Radical Therapist Collective (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971), viii–xi. Why peanut butter was chosen remains an open question. Successful therapy, however, required social, political and personal change.

  2. 2.

    Melvin Sabshin, Changing American Psychiatry: A Personal Perspective (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2008), 266.

  3. 3.

    Sandra L. Bloom, Creating Sanctuary: Toward the Evolution of Sane Societies (New York: Routledge, 2013), 114.

  4. 4.

    Gerald N. Grob, “Public Policy and Mental Illnesses: Jimmy Carter’s Presidential Commission on Mental Health,” The Milbank Quarterly 83, no. 3 (2005): 425–56.

  5. 5.

    Lewis A. Grossman, “The Rise of the Empowered Consumer,” Regulation 37, no. 4 (Winter 2014–2015): 36.

  6. 6.

    Dan Carpenter, Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 730–31. See Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  7. 7.

    James T. Patterson, The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), ix.

  8. 8.

    Robert M. Collins, Transforming America: Politics and Culture During the Reagan Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 7.

  9. 9.

    James H. Austin, Zen-Brain Reflections: Reviewing Recent Developments in Meditation and States of Altered Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 296.

  10. 10.

    Judi Chamberlin, “The Ex-patients’ Movement: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going,” Journal of Mind and Behaviour 11, no. 3 (1990): 323–64; Grossman, “The Rise of the Empowered Consumer”; David Herzberg, “Blockbusters and Controlled Substances: Miltown, Quaalude, and Consumer Demand for Drugs in Postwar America,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42, no. 4 (2011): 415–26; Erika Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

  11. 11.

    Robert Coles, “Young Psychiatrist Looks at His Profession,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1961, 108–11.

  12. 12.

    Frank Riessman and S.M. Miller, “Social Change Versus the ‘Psychiatric World View,’” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 34, no. 1 (1964): 29–38.

  13. 13.

    Bruno Bettelheim, “Review of Committee on Social Issues, Psychiatric Aspects of the Prevention of Nuclear War,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 21, no. 6 (1965): 55–56.

  14. 14.

    “Perspectives for the APA Under the New Constitution, 1968,” Raymond Waggoner Papers, 1926–1977, Correspondence, Folder 2, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, 2.

  15. 15.

    Ibid., 15–16.

  16. 16.

    Ibid., 13. See also “American Psychiatric Association: The Constitution,” American Journal of Psychiatry 125, no. 3 (1968): 434-a-439.

  17. 17.

    Raymond W. Waggoner, “Facing the Challenge of Today,” Hospital & Community Psychiatry 20, no. 10 (1969): 298; and Raymond W. Waggoner and Raymond Waggoner Jr., “Psychiatry in the Modern World,” Current Psychiatric Therapies 9 (1969): 9.

  18. 18.

    Walter E. Barton, “Prospects and Perspectives: Implications of Social Change for Psychiatry,” American Journal of Psychiatry 125, no. 2 (1968): 147–50.

  19. 19.

    “The Death of Inaction,” Psychiatric News, October 1968. Some excellent examples of psychiatry’s engagement with the wider world include: Bryant Wedge, “Training for a Psychiatry of International Relations,” American Journal of Psychiatry 125, no. 6 (1968): 731–36; and Howard P. Rome, “Psychiatry and Foreign Affairs: The Expanding Competence of Psychiatry,” American Journal of Psychiatry 125, no. 6 (1968): 725–30.

  20. 20.

    Richard Morrill, “Ad Hoc Committee for Social Action,” May 15, 1968, MS Coll 641, Box 61, Folder 735, Walter J. Lear Health Activism Collection, Annenberg Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania [hereafter WJLHAC] and idem, “Psychiatrists for Action on Racism and the Urban Crisis,” May 15, 1968, MS Coll 641, Box 61, Folder 735, WJLHAC.

  21. 21.

    Morrill, “Ad Hoc Committee for Social Action.”

  22. 22.

    Nathan Hurvitz, “The Status and Tasks of Radical Therapy,” Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, and Practice 14, no. 1 (1977): 70.

  23. 23.

    Ibid.

  24. 24.

    Claude Steiner, “Radical Psychiatry: Principles,” in The Radical Therapist, ed. Agel, 1 and 3.

  25. 25.

    Agel, ed., The Radical Therapist, xiii.

  26. 26.

    Much the same occurred with the Medical Committee for Human Rights in Boston and New York.

  27. 27.

    Hurvitz, “The Status and Tasks of Radical Therapy,” 67.

  28. 28.

    Ibid.

  29. 29.

    John A. Talbott, “Radical Psychiatry: An Examination of the Issues,” American Journal of Psychiatry 131, no. 2 (1974): 121–22.

  30. 30.

    Ibid.

  31. 31.

    Ibid.

  32. 32.

    Carl I. Cohen et al., “The Future of Community Psychiatry,” Community Mental Health Journal 39, no. 5 (2003): 460–62. See Morton O. Wagenfeld and Stanley S. Robin, “Social Activism and Psychiatrists in Community Health Centers,” American Journal of Community Psychology 6, no 3 (1978): 254; and Rodger Doyle, “Deinstitutionalization,” Scientific American 287, no. 38 (December 2002): 38.

  33. 33.

    David J. Rissmiller and Joshua H. Rissmiller, “Evolution of the Antipsychiatry Movement into Mental Health Consumerism,” Psychiatric Services 57, no. 6 (2006): 864.

  34. 34.

    Susan Stern, “America’s Mental Hospitals: Shock, Drugs, Surgery,” Seven Days, May 23, 1977, 28, MS 768, Clippings, 1971–1996, Judi Chamberlain Papers, Special Collections and Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst [hereafter JCP].

  35. 35.

    Ruth Laughlin, “A Victory for Mental Patients’ Rights: Psychiatric ‘Treatment,’” 1979, 8, MS 768, Clippings, 1971–1996, JCP.

  36. 36.

    Michael E. Staub, Madness Is Civilization: When Diagnosis Was Social, 1948–1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 123.

  37. 37.

    Judi Chamberlin, “Letters: Frontal Assault,” Voice, November 28, 1977, 4, MS 768, Clippings, 1971–1996, JCP.

  38. 38.

    Daniel Lewis and Milton Leebaw, “Where Have All the Patients Gone,” The New York Times, March 5, 1978.

  39. 39.

    Alexander Dunst, Madness in Cold War America (New York: Routledge, 2016), 54.

  40. 40.

    Ibid.

  41. 41.

    Nick Totton, Psychotherapy and Politics (London: Sage, 2000), 28–31.

  42. 42.

    Jerome Agel, ed., Rough Times (New York: Ballantine Books, 1973), i–iii.

  43. 43.

    Quoted in Totton, Psychotherapy and Politics, 28.

  44. 44.

    Dunst, Madness in Cold War America, 67.

  45. 45.

    MNN letter to subscribers, July 29, 1975, MS 768, Series 2, Box 6, Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression, Third, 1975, JCP.

  46. 46.

    Thomas Szasz, Coercion as Cure: A Critical History of Psychiatry (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 2010).

  47. 47.

    Geoffrey Reaume, “Lunatic to Patient to Person: Nomenclature in Psychiatric History and the Influence of Patients’ Activism in North America,” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 24, no. 4 (2002): 415–17.

  48. 48.

    Hurvitz, “The Status and Tasks of Radical Therapy,” 67.

  49. 49.

    The name of the MPLF’s house publication, “Free Expression,” reflected its desire to help ex- and current patients ‘fight for our personal liberty’. “Free Expression,” MS 768, Clippings, 1971–1996, JCP.

  50. 50.

    Chamberlin, “The Ex-patients’ Movement.” See also Lucas Richert, “‘Therapy Means Change, Not Peanut Butter’: Radical Psychiatry in the United States, 1967–1975,” Social History of Medicine 27, no. 1 (2014): 104–21.

  51. 51.

    Handwritten note, undated, MS 768, Series 2, Box 6, Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression, Fifth, 1977, JCP.

  52. 52.

    Hera Goldman, “Psychiatric Assault,” MS 768, Clippings, 1971–1996, JCP.

  53. 53.

    Patria Joanne Alvelo, “The Politics of Madness: The Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s” (MA diss., Sarah Lawrence College, 2009); Judi Chamberlin, “Organizing,” 4, cited in Lenny Lapon, Mass Murderers in White Coats: Psychiatric Genocide in Nazi Germany and the United States (Springfield: Psychiatric Genocide Research Institute, 1986), 170.

  54. 54.

    Anonymous to Tom, July 19, 1975, MS 768, Series 2, Box 6, Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression, Third, 1975, JCP.

  55. 55.

    Mabel to Judi Chamberlin, January 4, 1976, MS 768, Series 2, Box 6, Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression, Fourth, 1976, JCP.

  56. 56.

    “Fighting Psychiatric Oppression,” MS 768, Series 2, Box 6, Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression, Third, 1975, JCP.

  57. 57.

    Judi Chamberlin letter to members, June 8, 1978, MS 768, Series 2, Box 6, Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression, Sixth, 1978, JCP.

  58. 58.

    See, for example, the Mental Patients’ Liberation Project’s call for ‘no less than [Institutional Psychiatry’s] abolition’ in Tony Colletti, “The Jailers of the People,” MS 768, Clippings, 1971–1996, JCP.

  59. 59.

    Michael D. Galvin, Ph.D. to Judi Chamberlin, May 6, 1976, MS 768, Series 2, Box 6, Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression, Fourth, 1976, JCP.

  60. 60.

    Judi Chamberlin to Michael D. Galvin, Ph.D., May 14, 1976, MS 768, Series 2, Box 6, Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression, Fourth, 1976, JCP.

  61. 61.

    Michael D. Galvin, Ph.D. to Judi Chamberlin, May 19, 1976, MS 768, Series 2, Box 6, Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression, Fourth, 1976, JCP.

  62. 62.

    Ibid.

  63. 63.

    Lapon, Mass Murderers in White Coats, 171.

  64. 64.

    Letter to Chamberlin, 1977, MS 768, Series 2, Box 6, Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression, Fifth, 1977, JCP. This policy was carried over into the 1978 conference. See Letter from The Alliance for the Liberation of Mental Patients to members, April 5, 1978, MS 768, Series 2, Box 6, Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression, Sixth, 1978, JCP.

  65. 65.

    Lew Eli Budd to Judi Chamberlin, June 15, 1977, MS 768, Series 2, Box 6, Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression, Fifth, 1977, JCP.

  66. 66.

    “Frustration in Philadelphia by Judi Chamberlin,” undated, 3, MS 768, Series 2, Box 6, Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression, Sixth, 1978, JCP.

  67. 67.

    Talbott, “Radical Psychiatry,” 126.

  68. 68.

    Hurvitz, “The Status and Tasks of Radical Therapy,” 68.

  69. 69.

    Staub, Madness Is Civilization, 5.

  70. 70.

    Quoted in Talbott, “Radical Psychiatry,” 124–25. See “Insane Liberation Front,” in The Radical Therapist, ed. Agel, 2 and 15; “Mental Patients’ Liberation Front: Statement,” in ibid., 2 and 24.

  71. 71.

    Hurvitz, “The Status and Tasks of Radical Therapy,” 68.

  72. 72.

    Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (New York: Ballantine, 2004), xvii.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

    Lucas Richert

  2. Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

    Matthew DeCloedt

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  1. Lucas Richert
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History and Archaeology, University of Crete, Rethymno, Crete, Greece

    Despo Kritsotaki

  2. School of History, Classics and Archaeology, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Vicky Long

  3. Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

    Matthew Smith

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Richert, L., DeCloedt, M. (2019). American Psychiatry in Transition: Reform or Revolution?. In: Kritsotaki, D., Long, V., Smith, M. (eds) Preventing Mental Illness. Mental Health in Historical Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98699-9_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98699-9_9

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