American psychiatry: a tortured history
HistoryExtra podcast
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Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalysis of World War II
American troops suffered three times as many psychiatric casualties in World War II proportionately. When soldiers began to break down the answer really was well you would use a primitive form of psychotherapy and it tended to be called combat exhaustion or combat neurosis. Those folks got used to treating mental illness that way and after the war their ideas and the claim that they'd been successful which was wildly exaggerated fueled the growth of psychoanalysis. The medical training in medical schools was dominated by psychoanalysis from 1945 through into the late 70s. It seemed to dominate the profession but then all of a sudden at the end of the 70s and into the 80s it crumbled it's now a distinctly minority
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