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mental health

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    2/21/2023

    Does Sen. Fetterman's Depression Disclosure Signal Change in Mental Health Acceptance?

    by Jonathan Sadowsky

    51 years ago the Democratic vice presidential candidate, Senator Thomas Eagleton, was dropped from the ticket when it was revealed he had received treatment for depression. A historian of mental health says it's too simple to declare progress without acknowledging ongoing stigma. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    1/3/2022

    NY Mayor's Proposal to Lock Up Mentally Ill Has Long History

    by Elliott Young

    The impulse to heal the mentally ill has long battled the impulse to lock them up as a threat to the society. Eric Adams is trying to do the latter while claiming to do the former. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    5/17/2022

    What if Mental Illness Isn't All In Your Head?

    by Marco Ramos

    A historian of mental health reviews two new books and concludes that pharmaceutical and neurological approaches to mental health have failed and it's time to turn the lens onto society.

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    8/3/2021

    Moral Injury and the Forever Wars

    by Kelly Denton-Borhaug

    "Andy’s story clarifies a reality Americans badly need to grasp: the destruction of war goes far beyond its intended targets. In the end, its violence is impossible to control."

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    7/27/2021

    The U.S. has Never Tried a Comprehensive Approach to Mental Health Care

    by Hannah Zeavin

    "The United States has never redressed a massive shortage of mental health-care providers, and no unified national infrastructure is in place to assist the most vulnerable would-be patients with navigating the difficult process of finding competent care and paying for it."

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    2/16/2021

    Can Historians Be Traumatized by History? (Content Warning)

    by James Robins

    "If the historian—the very person supposed to process the past on behalf of everyone else—struggles with trauma, then it is little surprise that societies as a whole struggle to face the violence of how they were formed and how they prevailed."

  • SOURCE: CityLab
    4/14/2020

    How America Has Racialized Medicine During Epidemics

    Mab Segrest explores the history of blaming black people for bad health outcomes in her new book, “Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum.”

  • SOURCE: New Yorker
    5/20/19

    The Troubling History of Psychiatry

    Challenges to the legitimacy of the profession have forced it to examine itself, including the fundamental question of what constitutes a mental disorder.

  • SOURCE: Pacific Standard
    2/5/19

    How to Make Graduate School More Humane

    by David M. Perry

    There's a mental-health crisis among graduate students, and it bears particularly hard on those with disabilities. Fixing it requires specific mental-health supports—and broad cultural change.

  • How Depression Went Mainstream: Interview with Dr. Edward Shorter

    by Robin Lindley

    Psychiatrists are very interested in the historical perspectives because they can see the obvious power that an understanding of history brings to appreciating the current situation. Historians haven’t been so interested. Psychiatrists are centered on diagnosis and treatment, and those are the two aspects that are central to the practice of medicine.

  • Is Colorado's Institution for the Homeless Willowbrook Redux?

    by Alison Bateman-House

    Colorado could benefit from a history lesson. With Governor John Hickenlooper having just repurposed Fort Lyon, a former Veterans’ Administration hospital most recently used as a prison, for a homeless rehabilitation program, Coloradans should recall the experience of the Willowbrook State School, the institution famously described by Senator Robert Kennedy as a “snake pit.” At first glance, there is not much in common between Fort Lyon and Willowbrook. In an effort to address homelessness, particularly among veterans, Fort Lyon will house up to three hundred chronically homeless individuals, providing them with vocational training and supportive services for substance abuse and mental illness. After at least one year of residency at Fort Lyon, participants will be eligible to receive a Section 8 housing voucher.

  • The Tragedy of Involuntary Commitment

    by Bruce Chadwick

    Airswimming Irish Repertory Theatre 132 W. 22d Street New York, N.Y.Airswimming is a jolting shocker about two women incarcerated in a mental hospital in England for fifty years due to their eccentricity and because they violated British society’s rules of conduct during the 1920s. At the same time, Charlotte Jones’s 1997 play is an enduring, enchanting story of the strength of the human spirit and how two people’s friendship helped them survive a living hell.In 1922, Dora (played by Aedin Moloney) was tossed into St. Dymphnas Hospital for the Criminally Insane and followed there two years later by Persephone. They mark the first few years of their imprisonment, but so many years go by they lose count. The hospital has teamed them up to clean the bathrooms one hour each day, and that is the time we see them on stage. There, scrubbing down the bathtub, the pair realizes that they need each other to survive the Hades they occupy.