Laura Hirshbein

University of Michigan | U-M · Department of Psychiatry

In the wake of their heightened role in addressing the emotional challenges of United States soldiers during World War II, American psychiatrists increasingly argued that their knowledge of human nature, based on interpretation of unconscious processes, was a powerful tool in effecting changes in society. As they turned to training an adequate supp...

The Joint Commission on the Mental Health of Children (JCMHC) was a sprawling, multidisciplinary project that took shape in the years immediately after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Participants included child psychiatrists, educators, psychologists, social workers, philanthropists and other laypeople and professionals interested...

In his 2019 book Pastoral Aesthetics, Nathan Carlin reviews origin stories of bioethics, especially the ones generally told about how the field of bioethics came to be based on tragedies and technologies. This article highlights another origin story to further expand and build on the work Carlin has done to bring life to the dry and thin principles...

American child psychiatrists have long been interested in the problems of delinquent behaviour by juveniles. With the rise of specific psychiatric diagnoses in the 1960s and 1970s, delinquent behaviour was defined within the diagnosis of conduct disorder. Like all psychiatric diagnoses, this concept was shaped by particular historical actors in con...

Layfayette Ronald Hubbard (1911–1986) was a colourful and prolific American writer of science fiction in the 1930s and 1940s. During the time between his two decades of productivity and his return to science fiction in 1980, Hubbard founded the Church of Scientology. In addition to its controversial status as a religion and its troubling pattern of...

de Young Mary , Encyclopedia of Asylum Therapeutics, 1750–1950s (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015), pp. vi, 368, $55, paperback, ISBN: 978-0-7864-6897-3. - Volume 60 Issue 4 - Laura D. Hirshbein

Current public health literature suggests that the mentally ill may represent as much as half of the smokers in America. In Smoking Privileges, Laura D. Hirshbein highlights the complex problem of mentally ill smokers, placing it in the context of changes in psychiatry, in the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries, and in the experience of mental i...

The idea of tobacco or nicotine dependence as a specific psychiatric diagnosis appeared in 1980 and has evolved through successive editions of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Not surprisingly, the tobacco industry attempted to challenge this diagnosis through behind-the-scenes influence. But another entity...

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109269/1/jhbs21682.pdf

This study aims to develop a vignette-based assessment tool for medical students on the psychiatry clerkship, with the goal of capturing knowledge and clinical reasoning. The Short-Answer Vignette Exam (SAVE), four case vignettes with open-ended questions regarding assessment, differential diagnosis, management, and treatment, was developed for and...

Perceptions of hospitalization for children shifted from late nineteenth-century care designed to uplift poor children and create better citizens to mid-century attention to children’s emotional and medical needs. In the last few decades, sick children have become objects of sympathy and outpourings of affection. The history of hospitalized childre...

In 1967, select members of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP) met to discuss the future of the field. In their publication from this meeting, Psychotropic Drugs in the Year 2000, in 1971, the group imagined wild possibilities for chemical alteration of human behaviors and experience. These men thought that drugs could be used to...

Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) practitioners and anti-ECT activists have divergent interpretations of both the treatment and its history. Despite claims by ECT opponents that practitioners do not acknowledge memory side effects, the published literature on the procedure demonstrates psychiatrists' awareness of this issue. And though current ECT pr...

The history committee within the American Psychiatric Association was actively involved in the history of psychiatry in the early decades of the twentieth century, as well as from 1942 to 2009.This paper explores the role of this committee in the context of changes in the psychiatric profession over the twentieth century.

Mentally ill individuals have always smoked at high rates and continue to do so, despite public health efforts to encourage smoking cessation. In the last half century, the tobacco industry became interested in this connection, and conducted and supported psychiatric and basic science research on the mental health implications of smoking, long befo...

The address of the retiring president of the American Psychiatric Association has been a traditional part of the annual meeting of the association since 1883. The presidential address, which has explicitly been exempted from general discussion or criticism, has become an opportunity for the elected leader of the association to reflect on the state...

Most of the history of the tobacco industry over the last few decades has focused on the conflicts between tobacco industry leaders who promoted smoking and tobacco control advocates who warned of the health consequences. Yet a view of this conflict from the perspective of smokers who are also mentally ill raises questions about how to frame public...

Andrea Tone’s The Age of Anxiety fills an important gap in the history of American psychiatry, the rise and fall (and rise again) of tranquilizing medications. Tone describes the evolution of tranquilizers, beginning with Miltown and its success in the 1950s. She fleshes out the account of the medication’s discovery and marketing with the social an...

Clinical Assistant Professor, University of Michigan Department of Psychiatry, 1500 E. Medical Center Dr., SPC 5020, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-5020

Although physicians have attempted for centuries to uncover the biological differences between men and women with regard to mental illness, they continue to face the challenges of untangling biological factors from social and cultural ones. This article uses examples from history to illustrate three common problems in trying to establish biological...

Between 1900 and 1980, American psychiatrists employed a diagnosis of involutional melancholia to characterize older individuals, primarily postmenopausal women, who had constellations of depressive symptoms and specific personality traits. American interest in this diagnosis represented a confluence of social and psychoanalytic assumptions about g...

Edwin R. Wallace and John Gach intend their ambitious History of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology to be a reference book, an introduction and bibliography, a resource text for training programs as well as students and scholars, a demonstration of interpretative strategies in the history of psychiatry, and a book that is good for reading (xvii). Th...

In American Melancholy, Laura D. Hirshbein traces the growth of depression as an object of medical study and as a consumer commodity and illustrates how and why depression came to be such a huge medical, social, and cultural phenomenon. This is the first book to address gender issues in the construction of depression, explores key questions of how...

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a psychiatric treatment that has been in use in the United States since the 1940s. During the whole of its existence, it has been extensively discussed and debated within American popular magazines. While initial reports of the treatment highlighted its benefits to patients, accounts by the 1970s and 1980s were in...

Between the first (1952) and the third (1980) editions of psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, depression emerged as a specific disease category with concrete criteria. In this article, I analyze this change over time in psychiatric theory and diagnosis through an examination of medication trials and category formatio...

Brief cases designed for independent study were developed to allow third-year medical students some exposure to important concepts in emergency psychiatry during their required psychiatry clerkship. Five independent study cases were given to University of Michigan third-year medical students during their psychiatry clerkship, and their performance...

The address of the retiring president of the American Psychiatric Association has been a traditional part of the annual meeting of the association since 1883. The presidential address, which has explicitly been exempted from general discussion or criticism, has become an opportunity for the elected leader of the association to reflect on the state...

This article explores past, present, and future issues for women and teaching in academic psychiatry. A small study of didactic teaching responsibilities along faculty groups in one academic psychiatry department helps to illustrate challenges and opportunities for women in psychiatric teaching settings. Although women have comprised half of all me...

A century ago, psychiatrists understood women's susceptibility to mental illness in terms of their unique biology. Although contemporary physicians certainly do not share late 19th-century psychiatrists' biases about women and the social order, the similarities between today's emphasis on women's biology and earlier explanations of the relationship...

In the 1930s, some psychologists began to study and discuss the normal and pathological mental abilities of old age. This paper explores this research and its implications for an emerging definition of old age in the 1930s and 1940s. The argument is that these psychologists explained old age in terms of tests they had performed on children and youn...

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 57.1 (2002) 104-105 Concepts of Alzheimer Disease, the product of a 1997 symposium on Alzheimer disease (AD) in Marktbreit, Germany, is an ambitious collection of essays on a broad range of medical, historical, and social topics relating to AD. This symposium was part of a larger effort by Konr...

The aging of the American population has significantly changed medical practice over the last century. As is well known, life expectancy first began to increase dramatically in the late 19th century, but at the same time that the numbers of older people have been increasing, the social and cultural meanings of growing old have also changed. It is l...

The aging of the American population has significantly changed medical practice over the last century. As is well known, life expectancy first began to increase dramatically in the late 19th century, but at the same time that the numbers of older people have been increasing, the social and cultural meanings of growing old have also changed. It is l...

William Osler (1849-1919) has long been hailed as one of the most illustrious physicians in our history. Yet, Osler's claim to fame outside the medical profession in the early 20th century was through what became known as The Fixed Period controversy about the usefulness of old men. In 1905, as the 55-year-old Osler said farewell to Johns Hopkins U...

In the 1920s in the United States, public attention was riveted on the antics of a new, rebellious younger generation. Although popular representations focused on youth in crisis, these representations emphasized comparisons between young and old. This article explores the public discussions about youth culture in the 1920s and how they helped to r...

Dans cet article, l'auteur effectue une recherche sur l'image de la vieillesse produite par les medecins americains qui ont contribue a l'eclosion d'une nouvelle specialite medicale, la geriatrie, dans les annees 40.

In 1914, Progressive Era reformer Irving Fisher and wealthy contractor Harold Ley founded the Life Extension Institute (LEI), a business venture organized to address the problems of American health. For approximately two decades, from 1914 until the death of its medical director in 1931, the Life Extension Institute widely promoted its health maint...

The mu-opioid receptor is the principal site of action in the brain by which morphine, other opiate drugs of abuse, and endogenous opioid peptides effect analgesia and alter mood. A member of the seven-transmembrane domain (TM) G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) superfamily, the mu-opioid receptor modulates ion channels and second messenger effector...

Bulletin of the History of Medicine 72.3 (1998) 594-595 In Disciplining Old Age, Stephen Katz provides a concise, tightly focused critical reading of the major texts and organizations of gerontology, primarily in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Using the work of Michel Foucault as a model, Katz inverts the usual trajectory of gerontologi...

Bulletin of the History of Medicine 71. (1997) 365-366 From his first work on ideas of aging (Old Age in the New Land [1978]) to his volumes on policy (Shades of Gray [1983] and Social Security [1986]), W. Andrew Achenbaum has been passionately interested in recovering the history of old age. In his new work, Crossing Frontiers, he endeavors to exp...