Mental Health's Stalled (Biological) Revolution
Its Origins, Aftermath & Future Opportunities
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9685534 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Anne Harrington (0009-0002-3803-8218, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 152 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 166-185 |
| Publication date | 2023-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Daedalus (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0011-5266 • E-ISSN: 1548-6192 |
| Publisher | MIT Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1162/daed_a_02037 |
| OpenAlex | W4388878773 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 10 |
The 1980s, by common consensus, saw a big and remarkably rapid pivot away from previously dominant psychoanalytic and social science perspectives in American psychiatry and toward a so-called medical model foregrounding biology and the brain. The standard understanding is that this happened because, after years of wandering lost in a Freudian desert, the field had finally gained some fundamental new biological understandings of mental illness. The standard understanding is wrong. Nothing of sudden significance had happened on the biological front. There had been no major scientific or therapeutic breakthroughs. Why, then, did the field really pivot? This essay aims to explain. The answer is important, not least because choices made back then have directly shaped the fraught world of psychiatry with which we live today
Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Field (mathematics · Foregrounding · Freudian slip · Mental health · Nothing · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Sociology · Mental Health and Psychiatry · Philosophy · Psychology
The mental health sector and the social sciences in post-World War II USA. Part 1
WAR & Military Mental Health
Taming the Troublesome Child
The Mental Hygiene Movement, the Development of Personality and the School
Beyond the Metaphor of the Pendulum
Making psychedelics into medicines
Contradictions in the social production of clinical knowledge
There are always two sides to these things
The rise and crisis of psychoanalysis in the United States
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |