Laura Hirshbein
Biographic Data
| ID | 714212 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laura Hirshbein |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laura |
| FAMILY NAME | Hirshbein |
| SIGNATURE | HIRSHBEIN L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5771-0295 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 22 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Irony of Liberation in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest vividly portrays the tragic consequences of repressive psychiatric authority. The film was—and remains—one of the most memorable and well‐known products of anti‐psychiatry sentiment. Opponents of American psychiatry from the time period of Cuckoo's Nest objected to what they saw as social control rather than the profession's efforts to help people. But viewed in the historical context of psychiatry, t…
Psychiatric authority and social problems: A history of fears and expectations in 20th- and 21st-century America
In the 1970s, activist attorneys took on what they saw as a major issue in American society – the authority of psychiatrists to lock up hundreds of thousands of people against their will in state psychiatric hospitals in violation of their civil liberties. After a series of legal challenges to psychiatric power, states constructed mental health codes to limit involuntary psychiatric hospital admissions to a much smaller population of individuals …
Emancipation through health: John Harvey Kellogg’s advice to white women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
In the late 19th- and early 20th-century USA, at a time when most physicians were focused on women's health as it related to their reproductive organs, John Harvey Kellogg offered advice and assistance for women's good health based on their dress, diet and exercise. Kellogg was a physician, reformer and self-proclaimed scientist who was also the superintendent of a popular health resort, the Battle Creek Sanitarium, in Michigan. Kellogg was invol…
Do Less Harm: Ethical Questions for Health Historians Courtney E. Thompson and Kylie M. Smith
Looking through the Speculum: Examining the Women's Health Movement
What Does the History of Inpatient Psychiatric Unit Design Tell Us About Balancing Safety and Healing for Patients With Suicidal Behaviors
Since the Joint Commission shifted its focus to suicide mitigation strategy implementation in behavioral health units in 2007, examining modern design trends in historical context is more clinically and ethically important than ever. This article considers architectural evolutions in how health care organizations have used structure and space designs to balance safety and healing when housing patients who are suicidal
Marion Kenworthy and values in the history of American child psychiatry
Marion Kenworthy (1891-1980) was a pioneering child psychiatrist, mental hygiene and child guidance leader, and early member of the American Orthopsychiatric Association (now the Global Alliance for Behavioral Health and Social Justice). Throughout her illustrious career, Kenworthy advocated for values in the emerging field of child psychiatry, especially around prevention of mental illness, interdisciplinary collaboration, and social justice. Ke…
Managing power and psychiatric training in the United States, 1945–1990
In the wake of their heightened role in addressing the emotional challenges of United States soldiers during World War II, American psychiatrists increasingly argued that their knowledge of human nature, based on interpretation of unconscious processes, was a powerful tool in effecting changes in society. As they turned to training an adequate supply of psychiatrists to meet expanding demand, educators in psychiatry residency programs faced quest…
O’Connor v Donaldson (1975): Legal Challenges, Psychiatric Authority, and the Dangerousness Problem in Deinstitutionalization
In 1975, the Supreme Court heard the case of O’Connor v Donaldson, in which Kenneth Donaldson disputed the decision of his psychiatrists at the Florida State Hospital to keep him incarcerated for 15 years for a mental illness, though he was not dangerous or receiving treatment. The Donaldson decision pitted activist attorneys against psychiatrists who were increasingly beleaguered in their efforts to assert expertise about mental illness in Ameri…
Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture
Journal Article Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture Get access Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture. By Heather Murray. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. 259 pp. $45.00.) Laura Hirshbein Laura Hirshbein University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volum…
The Joint Commission on the Mental Health of Children, 1965-1970: Emotional disturbance, race and paths not taken in child psychiatry
The Joint Commission on the Mental Health of Children (JCMHC) was a sprawling, multidisciplinary project that took shape in the years immediately after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Participants included child psychiatrists, educators, psychologists, social workers, philanthropists and other laypeople and professionals interested in the plight of children. While the original inspiration for the JCMHC was to address the potential…
Treatment-resistant depression reconsidered
The term treatment-resistant depression (TRD) has been the focus of hundreds of studies and clinical trials, though it is not a diagnosable mental health condition according to current clinical standards. The term implies depression that is particularly difficult to treat. However, as we illustrate here, the use of the TRD construct creates significant concerns regarding patient welfare and optimal distribution of resources. First, TRD is frequen…
Foreign medical graduates and American psychiatry
Graduates from foreign medical schools (FMGs) began to staff US state psychiatric hospitals after World War II, and became increasingly associated with the poor quality of those institutions. Public and professional commentary on FMGs criticized their skills and suitability for the US healthcare system in the 1970s, at the same time that state hospitals were under increasing attack. By the 1980s and 1990s, the association between international me…
Entanglements of Eugenics, Public Health, and Academic Medicine: Reckoning with the Life and Legacies of Victor C. Vaughan
Victor C. Vaughan (1851-1929) was a noted medical educator, microbiologist, and active proponent for the idea of eugenics. Vaughan spent his career at the University of Michigan, where he served as Medical School Dean for many years. He lectured widely on the importance of "race betterment" and actively supported passage of state legislation that led to over 3,000 sterilizations in the state of Michigan. After his death, Vaughan's name was applie…
Leaning into Perplexity: A Case of a Patient Who Did Not Want Treatment But Also Did Not Want to Leave
A Consideration of Pastoral Aesthetics from the Perspective of History
Why psychiatry might cooperate with religion: The Michigan Society of Pastoral Care, 1945-1968
The early decades of the pastoral care movement were characterized by a remarkable collaboration with psychiatry. While historians of the religious aspects of this movement have noted the reliance of pastoral care on psychiatry and psychology, it has been less clear how and why mental health professionals elected to work with clergy. This paper uses the Michigan Society of Pastoral Care (MSPC), one of the early training programs for hospital chap…
Racism and Mental Health: Historical Perspectives on the Limits of Good Intentions
The ambivalent role of the institution in the history of child and adolescent psychiatry: A case study of the Hawthorn Centre in Michigan, USA
Historians have examined the role of psychiatric institutions in the USA and addressed whether this form of care helped or harmed patients (depending on the perspective of the time period, historical actors, and historians). But the story for children’s mental institutions was different. At the time when adult institutions were in decline, children’s mental hospitals were expanding. Parents and advocates clamoured for more beds and more services.…
Stella Chess and the History of American Child Psychiatry
Throughout its history, American child psychiatry has been a hospitable specialty for women physicians. In its early years when practitioners were often steeped in psychoanalysis and influenced by theorists such as Anna Freud, many leaders within the field were women. By the 1960s and 1970s, child psychiatry was moving away from analysis and towards more research-based practice. The biography of an important leader in this area, New York Universi…
American Pediatrics and the Transition from Mental Health to Illness Since the 1960s
American pediatricians are now bearing the brunt of massive increases in demand for treatment of mental illness in children and adolescents, areas in which many pediatricians have not been well trained. It would be logical to encourage policy measures to increase pediatricians’ expertise in this area to improve access to care. But the expanses in demand for services are about much more than increased incidence of biologically-based illnesses. Ins…
Happier? The History of a Cultural Movement That Aspired to Transform America
In Happier? the intellectual and cultural historian Daniel Horowitz explores the origins and social, cultural, economic, and political resonances of happiness studies and positive psychology in the United States from the second half of the twentieth century to the present. Horowitz begins and ends with one of the most well-known figures in the field, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman, who originally developed the theory …
L Ron Hubbard's science fiction quest against psychiatry
Layfayette Ronald Hubbard (1911-1986) was a colourful and prolific American writer of science fiction in the 1930s and 1940s. During the time between his two decades of productivity and his return to science fiction in 1980, Hubbard founded the Church of Scientology. In addition to its controversial status as a religion and its troubling pattern of intimidation and litigation directed towards its foes, Scientology is well known as an organised op…
Politics, Profit, and Psychiatric Diagnosis: A Case Study of Tobacco Use Disorder
The idea of tobacco or nicotine dependence as a specific psychiatric diagnosis appeared in 1980 and has evolved through successive editions of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Not surprisingly, the tobacco industry attempted to challenge this diagnosis through behind-the-scenes influence. But another entity put corporate muscle into supporting the diagnosis—the pharmaceutical industry. Psychiatry’s ongoing…
Hyperactive: The Controversial History of ADHD
Science, Gender, and the Emergence of Depression in American Psychiatry, 1952–1980
Between the first (1952) and the third (1980) editions of psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, depression emerged as a specific disease category with concrete criteria. In this article, I analyze this change over time in psychiatric theory and diagnosis through an examination of medication trials and category formation. Throughout, I pay particular attention to the ways in which psychiatrists and researchers invoked…
History, power, and electricity: American popular magazine accounts of electroconvulsive therapy, 1940-2005
Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a psychiatric treatment that has been in use in the United States since the 1940s. During the whole of its existence, it has been extensively discussed and debated within American popular magazines. While initial reports of the treatment highlighted its benefits to patients, accounts by the 1970s and 1980s were increasingly polarized. This article analyzes the popular accounts over time, particularly the ways in…
The senile mind: Psychology and old age in the 1930s and 1940s
In the 1930s, some psychologists began to study and discuss the normal and pathological mental abilities of old age. This paper explores this research and its implications for an emerging definition of old age in the 1930s and 1940s. The argument is that these psychologists explained old age in terms of tests they had performed on children and young adults. In addition, these professionals projected their culturally bound assumptions onto their s…
A Consideration of Pastoral Aesthetics from the Perspective of History
Our Little Patients: A Case Study of Hospitalized Children at the University of Michigan, 1890–2011
Perceptions of hospitalization for children shifted from late nineteenth-century care designed to uplift poor children and create better citizens to mid-century attention to children’s emotional and medical needs. In the last few decades, sick children have become objects of sympathy and outpourings of affection. The history of hospitalized children at the University of Michigan demonstrates change over time in involvement of caregivers and famil…
The Flapper and the Fogy: Representations of Gender and Age in the 1920s
In the 1920s in the United States, public attention was riveted on the antics of a new, rebellious younger generation. Although popular representations focused on youth in crisis, these representations emphasized comparisons between young and old. This article explores the public discussions about youth culture in the 1920s and how they helped to refine cultural categories of youth and old age. In addition, through gender-specific representations…
Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture
Journal Article Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture Get access Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture. By Heather Murray. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. 259 pp. $45.00.) Laura Hirshbein Laura Hirshbein University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volum…
Why psychiatry might cooperate with religion: The Michigan Society of Pastoral Care, 1945-1968
The early decades of the pastoral care movement were characterized by a remarkable collaboration with psychiatry. While historians of the religious aspects of this movement have noted the reliance of pastoral care on psychiatry and psychology, it has been less clear how and why mental health professionals elected to work with clergy. This paper uses the Michigan Society of Pastoral Care (MSPC), one of the early training programs for hospital chap…
Stella Chess and the History of American Child Psychiatry
Throughout its history, American child psychiatry has been a hospitable specialty for women physicians. In its early years when practitioners were often steeped in psychoanalysis and influenced by theorists such as Anna Freud, many leaders within the field were women. By the 1960s and 1970s, child psychiatry was moving away from analysis and towards more research-based practice. The biography of an important leader in this area, New York Universi…
We Mentally Ill Smoke a Lot: Identity, Smoking, and Mental Illness in America
Most of the history of the tobacco industry over the last few decades has focused on the conflicts between tobacco industry leaders who promoted smoking and tobacco control advocates who warned of the health consequences. Yet a view of this conflict from the perspective of smokers who are also mentally ill raises questions about how to frame public health policy for these individuals. Mentally ill consumers wrote to the tobacco industry between t…
"Normal" Old Age, Senility, and the American Geriatrics Society in the 1940s
Journal Article “Normal” Old Age, Senility, and the American Geriatrics Society in the 1940s Get access LAURA DAVIDOW HIRSHBEIN LAURA DAVIDOW HIRSHBEIN Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume 55, Issue 4, October 2000, Pages 337–362, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/55.4.337 Published: 01 October 2000
Crossing Frontiers: Gerontology Emerges as a Science (review)
Reviewed by: Crossing Frontiers: Gerontology Emerges as a Science Laura Davidow Hirshbein W. Andrew Achenbaum. Crossing Frontiers: Gerontology Emerges as a Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xiii + 278 pp. $59.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paperbound). From his first work on ideas of aging (Old Age in the New Land [1978]) to his volumes on policy (Shades of Gray [1983] and Social Security [1986]), W. Andrew Achenbaum has been passionatel…
Disciplining Old Age: The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge
Bulletin of the History of Medicine - Volume 72, Number 3, Fall 1998
"Normal" Old Age, Senility, and the American Geriatrics Society in the 1940s
Journal Article “Normal” Old Age, Senility, and the American Geriatrics Society in the 1940s Get access LAURA DAVIDOW HIRSHBEIN LAURA DAVIDOW HIRSHBEIN Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume 55, Issue 4, October 2000, Pages 337–362, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/55.4.337 Published: 01 October 2000
The Flapper and the Fogy: Representations of Gender and Age in the 1920s
In the 1920s in the United States, public attention was riveted on the antics of a new, rebellious younger generation. Although popular representations focused on youth in crisis, these representations emphasized comparisons between young and old. This article explores the public discussions about youth culture in the 1920s and how they helped to refine cultural categories of youth and old age. In addition, through gender-specific representations…
The senile mind: Psychology and old age in the 1930s and 1940s
In the 1930s, some psychologists began to study and discuss the normal and pathological mental abilities of old age. This paper explores this research and its implications for an emerging definition of old age in the 1930s and 1940s. The argument is that these psychologists explained old age in terms of tests they had performed on children and young adults. In addition, these professionals projected their culturally bound assumptions onto their s…
Science, Gender, and the Emergence of Depression in American Psychiatry, 1952–1980
Between the first (1952) and the third (1980) editions of psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, depression emerged as a specific disease category with concrete criteria. In this article, I analyze this change over time in psychiatric theory and diagnosis through an examination of medication trials and category formation. Throughout, I pay particular attention to the ways in which psychiatrists and researchers invoked…
History, power, and electricity: American popular magazine accounts of electroconvulsive therapy, 1940-2005
Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a psychiatric treatment that has been in use in the United States since the 1940s. During the whole of its existence, it has been extensively discussed and debated within American popular magazines. While initial reports of the treatment highlighted its benefits to patients, accounts by the 1970s and 1980s were increasingly polarized. This article analyzes the popular accounts over time, particularly the ways in…
History of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology: With an Epilogue on Psychiatry and the Mind-Body Relation (review)
Reviewed by: History of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology: With an Epilogue on Psychiatry and the Mind-Body Relation Laura Hirshbein Edwin R. Wallace IV and John Gach, eds. History of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology: With an Epilogue on Psychiatry and the Mind-Body Relation. New York: Springer, 2008. xlix + 862 pp. $219.00 (978-0-387-34707-3). Edwin R. Wallace and John Gach intend their ambitious History of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology to …
Gender, Age, and Diagnosis: The Rise and Fall of Involutional Melancholia in American Psychiatry, 1900–1980
Between 1900 and 1980, American psychiatrists employed a diagnosis of involutional melancholia to characterize older individuals, primarily postmenopausal women, who had constellations of depressive symptoms and specific personality traits. American interest in this diagnosis represented a confluence of social and psychoanalytic assumptions about gender, increased interest in old age, and the development of somatic therapies by the middle of the …
Sex and Gender in Psychiatry: A View from History
We Mentally Ill Smoke a Lot: Identity, Smoking, and Mental Illness in America
Most of the history of the tobacco industry over the last few decades has focused on the conflicts between tobacco industry leaders who promoted smoking and tobacco control advocates who warned of the health consequences. Yet a view of this conflict from the perspective of smokers who are also mentally ill raises questions about how to frame public health policy for these individuals. Mentally ill consumers wrote to the tobacco industry between t…
The American Psychiatric Association and the history of psychiatry
The history committee within the American Psychiatric Association was actively involved in the history of psychiatry in the early decades of the twentieth century, as well as from 1942 to 2009. This paper explores the role of this committee in the context of changes in the psychiatric profession over the twentieth century
Scientific Research and Corporate Influence: Smoking, Mental Illness, and the Tobacco Industry
Mentally ill individuals have always smoked at high rates and continue to do so, despite public health efforts to encourage smoking cessation. In the last half century, the tobacco industry became interested in this connection, and conducted and supported psychiatric and basic science research on the mental health implications of smoking, long before most mental health professionals outside the industry investigated this issue. Initially, represe…
Hyperactive: The Controversial History of ADHD
Our Little Patients: A Case Study of Hospitalized Children at the University of Michigan, 1890–2011
Perceptions of hospitalization for children shifted from late nineteenth-century care designed to uplift poor children and create better citizens to mid-century attention to children’s emotional and medical needs. In the last few decades, sick children have become objects of sympathy and outpourings of affection. The history of hospitalized children at the University of Michigan demonstrates change over time in involvement of caregivers and famil…
Politics, Profit, and Psychiatric Diagnosis: A Case Study of Tobacco Use Disorder
The idea of tobacco or nicotine dependence as a specific psychiatric diagnosis appeared in 1980 and has evolved through successive editions of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Not surprisingly, the tobacco industry attempted to challenge this diagnosis through behind-the-scenes influence. But another entity put corporate muscle into supporting the diagnosis—the pharmaceutical industry. Psychiatry’s ongoing…
L Ron Hubbard's science fiction quest against psychiatry
Layfayette Ronald Hubbard (1911-1986) was a colourful and prolific American writer of science fiction in the 1930s and 1940s. During the time between his two decades of productivity and his return to science fiction in 1980, Hubbard founded the Church of Scientology. In addition to its controversial status as a religion and its troubling pattern of intimidation and litigation directed towards its foes, Scientology is well known as an organised op…
Happier? The History of a Cultural Movement That Aspired to Transform America
In Happier? the intellectual and cultural historian Daniel Horowitz explores the origins and social, cultural, economic, and political resonances of happiness studies and positive psychology in the United States from the second half of the twentieth century to the present. Horowitz begins and ends with one of the most well-known figures in the field, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman, who originally developed the theory …
The ambivalent role of the institution in the history of child and adolescent psychiatry: A case study of the Hawthorn Centre in Michigan, USA
Historians have examined the role of psychiatric institutions in the USA and addressed whether this form of care helped or harmed patients (depending on the perspective of the time period, historical actors, and historians). But the story for children’s mental institutions was different. At the time when adult institutions were in decline, children’s mental hospitals were expanding. Parents and advocates clamoured for more beds and more services.…
Stella Chess and the History of American Child Psychiatry
Throughout its history, American child psychiatry has been a hospitable specialty for women physicians. In its early years when practitioners were often steeped in psychoanalysis and influenced by theorists such as Anna Freud, many leaders within the field were women. By the 1960s and 1970s, child psychiatry was moving away from analysis and towards more research-based practice. The biography of an important leader in this area, New York Universi…
American Pediatrics and the Transition from Mental Health to Illness Since the 1960s
American pediatricians are now bearing the brunt of massive increases in demand for treatment of mental illness in children and adolescents, areas in which many pediatricians have not been well trained. It would be logical to encourage policy measures to increase pediatricians’ expertise in this area to improve access to care. But the expanses in demand for services are about much more than increased incidence of biologically-based illnesses. Ins…
Leaning into Perplexity: A Case of a Patient Who Did Not Want Treatment But Also Did Not Want to Leave
A Consideration of Pastoral Aesthetics from the Perspective of History
Why psychiatry might cooperate with religion: The Michigan Society of Pastoral Care, 1945-1968
The early decades of the pastoral care movement were characterized by a remarkable collaboration with psychiatry. While historians of the religious aspects of this movement have noted the reliance of pastoral care on psychiatry and psychology, it has been less clear how and why mental health professionals elected to work with clergy. This paper uses the Michigan Society of Pastoral Care (MSPC), one of the early training programs for hospital chap…
Racism and Mental Health: Historical Perspectives on the Limits of Good Intentions
Psychology (30 works) · Psychiatry (26 works) · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices (23 works) · Medicine (23 works) · Political science (18 works) · Law (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Mental health (14 works) · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes (12 works) · Mental illness (8 works)