Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 Reflections on the Desperate Housewife
- 2 The Art of Marriage: Marriage and Mothering during the Post-War Period
- 3 The Housewife's Day: Personal Accounts of Housewifery and Mothering
- 4 Lightening Troubled Minds: Mid-Twentieth Century Medical Understandings of Affective Disorders
- 5 Not Something You Talk About: Personal Accounts of Anxiety and Depression
- 6 For Ladies in Distress: Representations of Anxiety and Depression in the Medical and Popular Press
- Conclusion
- Appendix
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
4 - Lightening Troubled Minds: Mid-Twentieth Century Medical Understandings of Affective Disorders
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 Reflections on the Desperate Housewife
- 2 The Art of Marriage: Marriage and Mothering during the Post-War Period
- 3 The Housewife's Day: Personal Accounts of Housewifery and Mothering
- 4 Lightening Troubled Minds: Mid-Twentieth Century Medical Understandings of Affective Disorders
- 5 Not Something You Talk About: Personal Accounts of Anxiety and Depression
- 6 For Ladies in Distress: Representations of Anxiety and Depression in the Medical and Popular Press
- Conclusion
- Appendix
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
As a general practitioner, I experience great difficulty in fitting my patients into the arbitrary classifications of depression which appear both in psychiatric literature and in the glossy pamphlets produced by the drug companies … A few [patients] present with symptoms of anxiety, but on the whole they appear to be essentially normal individuals who, sometimes in response to some form of stress … or sometimes without any discoverable cause, become depressed. It therefore hardly seems correct to label these patients as suffering from atypical, neurotic, hysterical, reactive or anxiety depression.
D. C. Morrell British Medical Journal, 20 January 1962In January 1962, a general practitioner, D. C. Morrell, wrote the above letter to the British Medical Journal (BMJ) articulating his concerns about the current system of classification for depressive and anxiety states. He went on to express deep concern about the ways in which powerful drugs ‘which were by no means devoid of side effects’ were being used widely without the existence of uniform, precise diagnostic criteria. The difficulties highlighted by Morrell in his letter reflect some of the concerns that developed during medical debates of the 1960s about the diagnosis and treatment of minor affective disorders. This chapter will draw on contemporary clinical research to examine the medical theories and treatment of neurotic and depressive states during the late 1950s and 1960s.
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- Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014