For this reason, psychiatry in the postwar era was crucial for any and all efforts to tackle the great social and political threats of the age: the allure of authoritarian govern- ments, the persistence of anti-Semitism, and the scourge of chronic poverty, social deviance, crime, and social unrest. [...] More specifically, physiologists at the Nation- al Heart Institute of the NIH (not the NIMH itself ) had begun to experiment with the behavior and physiology of laboratory animals by first dosing the animals with reserpine (one of the new major tranquilizers), and then injecting them with one of the new antidepressants. [...] an event of capital importance not just for Ameri- can but for world psychiatry, a turning of the page on psychodynamics, a redirection of the discipline towards a scientific course, a reembrace of the positivistic principles of the 19th-century, a denial of the antipsychiatric doctrine of the myth of mental ill- ness. [...] The new drive to reframe them as promising psychotherapeutic tools is of course partly a response to the flight of the pharmaceutical industry from the mental health sector, and the sense that something has to be done.53 But we also need to understand these devel- opments as part of a larger political story: the growing backlash against the legacies of the 1970s and 1980s War on Drugs, a phenomeno. [...] 12 Albert Deutsch, The Story of GAP: Relating to the Origins, Goals, and Activities of a Unique Medical Organization, the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, and Its Contributions to Professional and Social Progress (New York: Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, 1959).
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- 20
- Published in
- United States of America
