Mental Health and Ideals of Citizenship: Patient Care at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., 1903--1962

Abstract

367 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010.The post-World War II era witnessed important changes in both psychiatrists' vision of U.S. citizenship and the institutional culture at St. Elizabeths. Physicians took an increasingly liberal view of race relations under Winfred Overholser, who succeeded White as superintendent in 1937 and was prompted by national developments to integrate the hospital in 1954. These same psychiatrists promoted a restrictive domestic ideal for their female patients, in spite of the fact that middle-class married women were entering the labor market in unprecedented numbers. Physicians charted a cautious middle path in debates on homosexuality, maintaining that same-sex desires signified deep psychological maladjustment even as they protested policies criminalizing consensual sexual contact between adults. These developments occurred in the context of a general liberalization of institutional culture in the postwar decades. Through their own efforts as well as through innovations in clinical psychiatry, patients in the 1940s and 1950s found new opportunities for self-expression and began to articulate a novel sense of shared identity. By the time the major tranquilizers appeared, the appropriateness of long-term custodial care for psychologically-impaired men and women had already come into question.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD