Emotionally Disturbed

A History of Caring for America's Troubled Children

Deborah Blythe Doroshow

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780226621432
• eBook ISBN: 9780226621579
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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.

Notes

Introduction

1. Lauretta Bender, Child Psychiatric Techniques; Diagnostic and Therapeutic Approach to Normal and Abnormal Development through Patterned, Expressive, and Group Behaviour (Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1952), 89.

2. Ibid., 216.

3. Ibid., 89, 216.

4. Ibid., 6.

5. Lauretta Bender, “Group Activities on a Children’s Ward as Methods of Psychotherapy,” American Journal of Psychiatry 93, no. 5 (March 1, 1937): 1156.

6. Ibid., 1160–65; Bender, Child Psychiatric Techniques, 216.

7. Bender, Child Psychiatric Techniques, 91.

8. Ibid., 216.

9. Historian Kathleen W. Jones suggests that seriously mentally ill children were grouped with the “feebleminded” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and often institutionalized with a heterogeneous group of children who might be considered intellectually disabled, epileptic, and delinquent by today’s standards (Taming the Troublesome Child: American Families, Child Guidance, and the Limits of Psychiatric Authority [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999], 26). On the history of intellectual disability in America, see James W. Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States, Medicine and Society 6 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Peter L. Tyor and Leland V. Bell, Caring for the Retarded in America: A History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984). On children in state hospitals, see Richard L. Lael, Barbara Brazos, and Margot Ford McMillen, Evolution of a Missouri Asylum: Fulton State Hospital, 1851–2006 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2007), esp. 159–60 and chap. 13. Lael et al. discuss children beginning with a rise in youth admissions in the late 1950s, but they were likely present in smaller numbers beforehand.

10. American Psychiatric Association, Psychiatric Inpatient Treatment of Children: Report of the Conference on Inpatient Psychiatric Treatment for Children Held at Washington, D. C., October 17–21, 1956 (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1957), xi; Lauretta Bender and Archie A. Silver, “Problems in Community Planning for Disturbed Children as Suggested by Hospital Experience,” Journal of Educational Sociology 24, no. 9 (May 1951): 1.

11. Joseph H. Reid and Helen R. Hagan, Residential Treatment of Emotionally Disturbed Children: A Descriptive Study (New York: Child Welfare League of America, 1952), 39.

12. Steven L. Schlossman, Love and the American Delinquent: The Theory and Practice of “Progressive” Juvenile Justice, 1825–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).

13. Jones, Taming the Troublesome Child; Margo Horn, Before It’s Too Late: The Child Guidance Movement in the United States, 1922–1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).

14. Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind.

15. Steven Schlossman uses case studies to explore juvenile courts and reform institutions for delinquent children (Love and the American Delinquent) and David B. Wolcott’s Cops and Kids explores how delinquency was treated more proximally on the streets (Cops and Kids: Policing Juvenile Delinquency in Urban America, 1890–1940 [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005]).

16. Horn, Before It’s Too Late; Jones, Taming the Troublesome Child.

17. Ian Hacking, “Making Up People,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 222–36.

18. See Anna G. Creadick, Perfectly Average: The Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010).

19. On nostalgia and the construction of the “good old days” narrative, see Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992). On heterogeneous cultural messages about women’s “appropriate” gender roles and the variety of ways women resisted those roles, see Joanne J. Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). On the personal cost of striving for normality, see Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing up Female in the Fifties (Boston: Beacon Books, 1992); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

20. Deborah Blythe Doroshow, “An Alarming Solution: Bedwetting, Medicine, and Behavioral Conditioning in Mid-Twentieth-Century America,” Isis 101, no. 2 (June 2010): 312–37. On the slow pace of clinical change more generally, see Joel D. Howell, Technology in the Hospital: Transforming Patient Care in the Early Twentieth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Martin S. Pernick, A Calculus of Suffering: Pain, Professionalism, and Anesthesia in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); John Harley Warner, The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America, 1820–1885 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).

Chapter 1

1. Albert Deutsch, Our Rejected Children (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950), 20.

2. Ibid., 15.

3. Ibid., 50–51.

4. Ibid., 133–34.

5. Ibid., 138–39.

6. As Marshall B. Jones explains, “‘dependent’ meant ‘in need of public or charitable support,’ and ‘neglected’ included abandoned and abused children” (“Decline of the American Orphanage, 1941–1980,” Social Service Review 67, no. 3 [September 1993]: 462).

7. For example, societies opposing cruelty to children were founded in the 1870s in New York and Boston (Susan E. Lederer, Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Also see Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence: Boston, 1880–1960 (New York: Viking, 1988), chap. 2. On orphan trains, see Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Marilyn Irvin Holt, The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992); and Stephen O’Connor, Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• introduction
• one / O Pioneers!
• Interlude: The Road to Residential
• Interlude: Therapeutics in Residential Treatment
• Interlude: Homeward Bound
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Key to Archives and Manuscripts
• Notes
• Index