Preventing Mental Illness

This book provides an overview of a diverse array of preventive strategies relating to mental illness, and identifies their achievements and shortcomings. The chapters in this collection illustrate how researchers, clinicians and policy makers drew inspiration from divergent fields of knowledge and practice: from eugenics, genetics and medication to mental hygiene, child guidance, social welfare, public health and education; from risk management to radical and social psychiatry, architectural design and environmental psychology. It highlights the shifting patterns of biological, social and psychodynamic models, while adopting a gender perspective and considering professional developments as well as changing social and legal contexts, including deinstitutionalisation and social movements. Through vigorous research, the contributors demonstrate that preventive approaches to mental health have a long history, and point to the conclusion that it might well be possible to learn from such historical attempts. The book also explores which of these approaches are worth considering in future and which are best confined to the past. Within this context, the book aims at stoking and informing debate and conversation about how to prevent mental illness and improve mental health in the years to come.

Chapters 3, 10, and 12 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

1. Introduction; Matthew Smith, Vicky Long, Oonagh Walsh, and Despo Kritsotaki.- 2. Imagination and the Prevention of Violence: Frederic Wertham, Mass Media, and Mental Hygiene, 1946-1958; Dennis Doyle.- 3. ‘They may strike back at society in a vengeful manner’: Preventing the Psychological Scars of Acne in Post-War America; Iain Ferguson.- 4. Preventing Mental Illness, Preventing Delinquency: Juvenile Justice and Child Psychiatry in Post-war America; Erin Lux.- 5. Social and mental hygiene: Models of mental illness prevention in twentieth-century Greece (1900-1980); Despo Kritsotaki. 6. Socialism, Society, and the Struggle against Mental Illness: Preventative Psychiatry in Post-war Yugoslavia; Mat Savelli.- 7. The History of Suicide Prevention in Finland, 1860s-2010s; Mikko Myllykangas.- 8. Risk Assessment in an Age of Neoliberalism: John Monahan’s The Clinical Prediction of Violent Behavior (1981); Matthew Gambino.- 9. American Psychiatry in Transition: Reform or Revolution?; Lucas Richert and Matthew DeCloedt.- 10. Designing for Mental Health: Psychiatry, Psychology and the Architectural Study Project; Edmund Ramsden.- 11. Newgenics and the Politics of Choice: A Historical Look at Canada’s Psychiatric Institutions in the 1970s; Erika Dyck.- 12. Preventing Male Mental Illness in Post-War Britain; Ali Haggett.