IsisCB Explore

Book ID: CBB495157182

Emotionally Disturbed: A History of Caring for America's Troubled Children (2019)

Doroshow, Deborah Blythe (Author)

University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 2019
Language: English

ISBN: 9780226621432

Publication Date: 2019
Physical Details: 344

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

Google Books

Psychology Therapeutic practice; therapy; treatment Mental disorders and diseases Emotions; passions Children 20th century United States

Before the 1940s, children in the United States with severe emotional difficulties would have had few options for care. The first option was usually a child guidance clinic within the community, but they might also have been placed in a state mental hospital or asylum, an institution for the so-called feebleminded, or a training school for delinquent children. Starting in the 1930s, however, more specialized institutions began to open all over the country. Staff members at these residential treatment centers shared a commitment to helping children who could not be managed at home. They adopted an integrated approach to treatment, employing talk therapy, schooling, and other activities in the context of a therapeutic environment. Emotionally Disturbed is the first work to examine not only the history of residential treatment but also the history of seriously mentally ill children in the United States. As residential treatment centers emerged as new spaces with a fresh therapeutic perspective, a new kind of person became visible—the emotionally disturbed child. Residential treatment centers and the people who worked there built physical and conceptual structures that identified a population of children who were alike in distinctive ways. Emotional disturbance became a diagnosis, a policy problem, and a statement about the troubled state of postwar society. But in the late twentieth century, Americans went from pouring private and public funds into the care of troubled children to abandoning them almost completely. Charting the decline of residential treatment centers in favor of domestic care–based models in the 1980s and 1990s, this history is a must-read for those wishing to understand how our current child mental health system came to be.

...More

Reviewed By

Review Abbey Jin; Diana Tran (2021) Review of "Emotionally Disturbed: A History of Caring for America's Troubled Children". History of Psychiatry (pp. 117-119). unapi

Review Steven Noll (2020) Review of "Emotionally Disturbed: A History of Caring for America's Troubled Children". Social History of Medicine (pp. 672-673). unapi

Review Kathleen W Jones (2020) Review of "Emotionally Disturbed: A History of Caring for America's Troubled Children". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (pp. 356-358). unapi

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB495157182

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Book Mayes, Rick; Bagwell, Catherine; Erkulwater, Jennifer L.; (2009)
Medicating Children: ADHD and Pediatric Mental Health (/p/isis/citation/CBB001000212/)

Article Raz, Mical; (2008)
Between the Ego and the Icepick: Psychosurgery, Psychoanalysis, and Psychiatric Discourse (/p/isis/citation/CBB000930707/)

Book Chiang, Howard Hsueh-Hao; (2014)
Psychiatry and Chinese History (/p/isis/citation/CBB001422492/)

Article Nelleke Bakker; (2021)
From talking cure to play- and group-therapy: outpatient mental health care for children in the Netherlands c. 1945–70 (/p/isis/citation/CBB616733371/)

Thesis Doroshow, Deborah Blythe; (2012)
Emotionally Disturbed Residential Treatment, Child Psychiatry, and the Creation of Normal Children in Mid-Twentieth Century America (/p/isis/citation/CBB001567369/)

Thesis Menefee, Joan Kuulei; (2005)
Decoding Distraction: Attention in American Culture, 1871--1916 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001561888/)

Thesis Eder, Sandra; (2011)
The Birth of Gender: Clinical Encounters with Hermaphroditic Children at Johns Hopkins (1940--1956) (/p/isis/citation/CBB001567298/)

Article Granek, Leeat; (2010)
Grief as Pathology: The Evolution of Grief Theory in Psychology from Freud to the Present (/p/isis/citation/CBB000953644/)

Article Morgese, Giorgia; Ester Acito; (2019)
The Study of Childhood Mental Illness in the Twentieth Century Journal «Infanzia Anormale» (/p/isis/citation/CBB013245762/)

Article Hock, Lisabeth; (2011)
Women and Melancholy in Nineteenth-Century German Psychiatry (/p/isis/citation/CBB001232203/)

Book Smith, Matthew; (2011)
An Alternative History of Hyperactivity: Food Additives and the Feingold Diet (/p/isis/citation/CBB001420219/)

Article Hutchison, Iain; (2011)
Institutionalization of Mentally-Impaired Children in Scotland, c.1855--1914 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001232201/)

Article Moura, Renata Heller de; Boarini, Maria Lucia; (2012)
A saúde da família sob as lentes da higiene mental (/p/isis/citation/CBB001420579/)

Book Robert Ellis; Sarah Kendal; Steven J. Taylor; (2021)
Voices in the History of Madness: Personal and Professional Perspectives on Mental Health and Illness (/p/isis/citation/CBB571043163/)

Article Bromley, Elizabeth; (2006)
Stimulating a Normal Adjustment: Misbehavior, Amphetamines, and the Electroencephalogram at the Bradley Home for Children (/p/isis/citation/CBB000671321/)

Book Sarah Fawn Montgomery; (2018)
Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (/p/isis/citation/CBB129442531/)

Chapter Ben Harris; (2016)
Therapeutic Work and Mental Illness in America, c. 1830-1970 (/p/isis/citation/CBB612225456/)

Article Bonner, Kieran; (2013)
Eros and Ironic Intoxication: Profound Longing, Madness and Discipleship in Plato's Symposium and in Modern Life (/p/isis/citation/CBB001213732/)

Article Rebecca Lemov; (2018)
On Being Psychotic in the South Seas, Circa 1947 (/p/isis/citation/CBB868636704/)

Book Lund, Mary Ann; (2010)
Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading “The Anatomy of Melancholy” (/p/isis/citation/CBB001220196/)