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Article ID: CBB091296981

Helping Troubled Children and Cultivating the Race: The Mental Hygienic Guidance Centres of the Public Health Association of Swedish Finland, 1930s–1950s (2020)

Bergenheim, Sophy (Author)

Social History of Medicine
Volume: 33
Issue: 4
Pages: 1282-1305

URI: https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkz052

DOI: 10.1093/shm/hkz052

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This article looks at the mental hygienic guidance centres of the Public Health Association of Swedish Finland (Samfundet Folkhälsan, or Folkhälsan for short). For Folkhälsan, mental hygiene was a part of a broader context, in which public health and racial hygiene were fundamentally motivated by Finland-Swedish minority nationalism. Folkhälsan’s mental hygienic ideas are illuminated through the interrelated frames of degeneration and social engineering. The former portrayed mental and social deviance as a social, biological and moral threat to the collective, whereas the latter saw social behaviour, including maladjustment, as a phenomenon that could be influenced. For Folkhälsan’s mental hygienists, it was central to determine type and degree of abnormality; whether the clients were socially maladjusted ‘problem children’ or ‘feeble-minded children’. In both cases, the problem was seen to be caused by (lower-class) parents: through incompetent parenting and/or by passing on poor mental qualities to their offspring.

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