title: Social disorder and diagnostic order: the US Mental Hygiene Movement, the Midtown Manhattan study and the development of psychiatric epidemiology in the 20th century.
abstract: Recent scholarship regarding psychiatric epidemiology has focused on shifting notions of mental disorders. In psychiatric epidemiology in the last decades of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, mental disorders have been perceived and treated largely as discrete categories denoting an individual's mental functioning as either pathological or normal. In the USA, this grew partly out of evolving modern epidemiological work responding to the State's commitment to measure the national social and economic burdens of psychiatric disorders and subsequently to determine the need for mental health services and to survey these needs over time. Notably absent in these decades have been environmentally oriented approaches to cultivating normal, healthy mental states, approaches initially present after World War II. We focus here on a set of community studies conducted in the 1950s, particularly the Midtown Manhattan study, which grew out of a holistic conception of mental health that depended on social context and had a strong historical affiliation with: the Mental Hygiene Movement and the philosophy of its founder, Adolf Meyer; the epidemiological formation of field studies and population surveys beginning early in the 20th century, often with a health policy agenda; the recognition of increasing chronic disease in the USA; and the radical change in orientation within psychiatry around World War II. We place the Midtown Manhattan study in historical context--a complex narrative of social institutions, professional formation and scientific norms in psychiatry and epidemiology, and social welfare theory that begins during the Progressive era (1890-1920) in the USA.
authors.affiliation: Department of Epidemiology, Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health, Northern Manhattan Center of Excellence for Minority Health and Health Disparities, Department of Medicine, Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, USA and Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, USADepartment of Epidemiology, Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health, Northern Manhattan Center of Excellence for Minority Health and Health Disparities, Department of Medicine, Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, USA and Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, USA dana.march@columbia.edu.
authors.forename: Dana
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: March
authors.affiliation: Department of Epidemiology, Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health, Northern Manhattan Center of Excellence for Minority Health and Health Disparities, Department of Medicine, Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, USA and Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, USADepartment of Epidemiology, Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health, Northern Manhattan Center of Excellence for Minority Health and Health Disparities, Department of Medicine, Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, USA and Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, USA.
authors.forename: Gerald M
authors.initials: GM
authors.lastname: Oppenheimer
mesh_terms: D039721:Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; D004813:Epidemiology / Q000266:history*; D006291:Health Policy; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049674:History, 21st Century; D006778:Hospitals, Psychiatric / Q000266:history; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000266:history*; D008603:Mental Health; D008605:Mental Health Services / Q000266:history* / Q000458:organization & administration; D009519:New York City; D011570:Psychiatry / Q000266:history*; D012106:Research; D014481:United States
keywords: Psychiatry; community studies; health services; history; methods; psychiatric epidemiology; survey research