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Mad Among Us
In the first comprehensive one-volume history of the treatment of the mentally ill, the foremost historian in the field compellingly recounts our various attempts to solve this ever-present dilemma from colonial times to the present. Gerald Grob charts the growth of mental hospitals in response to the escalating numbers of the severely and persistently mentally ill and the deterioration of these hospitals under the pressure of too many patients and too few resources. Mounting criticism of psychiatric techniques such as shock therapies, drugs, and lobotomies and of mental institutions as inhumane places led to a new emphasis on community care and treatment. While some patients benefited from the new community policies, they were ineffective for many mentally ill substance abusers. Grob’s definitive history points the way to new solutions. It is at once an indispensable reference and a call for a humane and balanced policy in the future.
From Asylum to Community
The distinguished historian of medicine Gerald Grob analyzes the post-World War II policy shift that moved many severely mentally ill patients from large state hospitals to nursing homes, families, and subsidized hotel rooms--and also, most disastrously, to the streets. On the eve of the war, public mental hospitals were the chief element in the American mental health system. Responsible for providing both treatment and care and supported by major portions of state budgets, they employed more than two-thirds of the members of the American Psychiatric Association and cared for nearly 98 percent of all institutionalized patients. This study shows how the consensus for such a program vanished, ...
Mental Illness and American Society, 1875-1940
Gerald N. Grob's Mental Institutions in America: Social Policy to 1875 has become a classic of American social history. Here the author continues his investigations by a study of the complex interrelationships of patients, psychiatrists, mental hospitals, and government between 1875 and World War II. Challenging the now prevalent notion that mental hospitals in this period functioned as jails, he finds that, despite their shortcomings, they provided care for people unable to survive by themselves. From a rich variety of previously unexploited sources, he shows how professional and political concerns, rather than patient needs, changed American attitudes toward mental hospitals from support t...
Mental institutions in America
Mental Institutions in America: Social Policy to 1875 examines how American society responded to complex problems arising out of mental illness in the nineteenth century. All societies have had to confront sickness, disease, and dependency, and have developed their own ways of dealing with these phenomena. The mental hospital became the characteristic institution charged with the responsibility of providing care and treatment for individuals seemingly incapable of caring for themselves during protracted periods of incapacitation. The services rendered by the hospital were of benefit not merely to the afflicted individual but to the community. Such an institution embodied a series of moral im...
The Deadly Truth
The Deadly Truth chronicles the complex interactions between disease and the peoples of America from the pre-Columbian world to the present. Grob's ultimate lesson is stark but valuable: there can be no final victory over disease. The world in which we live undergoes constant change, which in turn creates novel risks to human health and life. We conquer particular diseases, but others always arise in their stead. In a powerful challenge to our tendency to see disease as unnatural and its virtual elimination as a real possibility, Grob asserts the undeniable biological persistence of disease. Diseases ranging from malaria to cancer have shaped the social landscape--sometimes through brief, fu...
Health Care Policy in Contemporary America
Americans have benefited from substantial improvements in health since the end of World War II. They live longer and grow taller; they have the safest and cheapest food supply on the planet; they have seen virtually all childhood diseases brought under control. Yet concerns about health remain widespread today. Cancer seems to be everywhere; autoimmune, nervous, and environmental diseases have reached pandemic proportions; medical malpractice suits have proliferated. How can we have received so many benefits while still being as worried as ever about our health and the health care system established to ensure and extend those benefits? The historical perspective provided by the essays in thi...
From Melancholia to Prozac
Exactly what is depression? Do we under- or over-diagnose it? Do treatments on offer really work? Clark Lawlor sheds light on the current debates by looking back at how depression has been described, understood, and dealt with in other cultures and throughout history.
Disease and the Modern World: 1500 to the Present Day
‘Mark Harrison's book illuminates the threats posed by infectious diseases since 1500. He places these diseases within an international perspective, and demonstrates the relationship between European expansion and changing epidemiological patterns. The book is a significant introduction to a fascinating subject.’ Gerald N. Grob, Rutgers State University In this lively and accessible book, Mark Harrison charts the history of disease from the birth of the modern world around 1500 through to the present day. He explores how the rise of modern nation-states was closely linked to the threat posed by disease, and particularly infectious, epidemic diseases. He examines the ways in which disease...
So Far Disordered in Mind
Between the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 and the Great Depression in 1929 the San Francisco Superior Court committed more than 12,000 city residents to the insane asylums of California. Who were these people? What brought them to the attention of the court, and what behavior did the medical examiners cite as evidence of insanity? What do these commitments reveal about the social and cultural meaning of insanity and other forms of deviant behavior in industrial California--and by extension in the rest of urban America in the early twentieth century? This book--the fist historical study of insanity to analyze thousands of court commitment records--provides an original look at the social, i...
