1940s Psychiatry and Stucky historical meta (let's chat, if you like!)

[daphneblithe]

I’ve been loving all the historical meta on Steve and Bucky’s 1940s world. I will be writing my OWN, on psychiatry in the interwar and Second World War period, including of traumatized soldiers both once they returned to home and while they were still in war theaters.

Electroshock therapy is still well known, but we’ve largely forgotten the therapy that developed alongside it: insulin shock therapy, and forced sleep. It was truly grim and disproportionately affected women/queer people/traumatized soldiers.

For now, though, all that research is in the Stucky Sleeping Beauty fusion, love among the ruins.  I am always up for talking to anybody about this research, here, or on ao3 or Twitter or tumblr.

I am always up for chatting about Fucked Up Psychiatric Practices of Yore, so if that's your kind a thing then let's chat somewhere :)

Comments

[daphneblithe]

SO MUCH TO SAY and I can't fit it ALL into a comment box but as a tiny start!

Admittedly, 40s psychiatry - the surge in new therapeutic modalities that happened in the 1930s --was inspired by absolutely well-intentioned hope that finally, for the first time in Ever, psychiatry had therapeutic options available beyond either confining people literally, or confining them pharmacologically -- making them so drugged they may as well have been in a straitjacket. There was a huge surge of energy and optimism that now there were steps that might change things.

The steps indeed did change things, but that included changing a whole lot of people to be permanently neurologically damaged or dead. So ... hopes decidedly not fulfilled.

The War was especially terrible in multiple ways - both Wars - in terms of psychiatric care. @pale_anactoria's work is about this, very much. For a little while psychiatric institutions had become more spacious and well regulated and productive - the 19th century had several institutions (generally private) that were far better than the earlier terrible days - but the earlier terrible days didn't stop everywhere, and when the War came things deteriorated across the board. Rationing, overcrowding, staffing issues, all these things led to serious neglect, with the consequence that people would be crammed into rooms together beyond capacity, left hungry, and often locked up for days on end. Tuberculosis spread like wildfire in sanatoria as a result.

Therapeutically, there was huge hope that the new chemical psychotropics and other drugs would be able to fix the mind. Psychiatry had always been seen as a rather poor relation of other emerging medical fields, but now finally there was hope that finally psychiatry could start repairing minds like other fields repaired bodies. Central to that hope were new drugs and initiatives like the two Shock Therapies -- and that devotion to them was part of why it was so hard for people to give them up, even after DECADES showed the horrific result.

I have SO MUCH MORE TO SAY and eventually I must carve out time to say all of it . :) And a lot of it is in the fic -- creativity is another venue to explore it, and I am glad, because I think it is important to convey the emotional textures of the suffering, what it was like. SO I draw on a lot of autobiography and memoir to do that in the creative work. I really want to make a place where we can think about what this did to people, what it felt like. And I want to think about the people who didn't make it. I think it's important.

And it's so little known about today.

[dhrachth]

I think the dark history of psychiatry is intentionally swept under the rug, mostly for altruistic reasons--much like a lot of the horrific things done to people were for altruistic reasons.

Admitting to electro shock, insulin shock, lobotomization, and assorted other treatments that probably weren't quite as bad as those first three but were still hugely traumatic, isn't the best way to convince people to seek treatment now.

"Come see us about your anxiety, depression, or PTSD! We haven't routinely accidentally killed or intentionally brain damaged people for several decades!" isn't the best sales pitch.

I'll admit I haven't read the fic yet. If I think it's going to be anything other than domestic/happy/fluff, I try to wait until all the chapters are out. I can't handle distressing stuff piecemeal.

[daphneblithe]

You are so right, psychiatry has a tricky profile with some of its past horrors. And like all human activities, social inequalities, racism, sexism, classism, disablism, all also played a big part in the way certain patterns of care would play out.

So much more to say about it ! Xx