History Research Seminar Series: “Peace of Mind: Social Psychiatry, Universal Basic Income and Preventing Mental Illness in the USA”

Professor Matthew Smith (University of Strathclyde)

Peace of Mind: Social Psychiatry, Universal Basic Income and Preventing Mental Illness in the USA

Abstract

Following the Second World War, a new, interdisciplinary and preventive approach to psychiatry gained influence in the US.  Social psychiatry involved teams of social scientists and psychiatrists which explored the environmental causes of mental illness.  Although social psychiatry triggered deinstitutionalisation and the community mental health movement, it is little known or understood today.  By exploring the four most important social psychiatry research projects, this paper argues that not only should social psychiatry feature more in the historiography of twentieth-century mental health and psychiatry, but it also should inform current attempts to prevent mental illness, redirecting us to focus more on addressing systemic factors, such as poverty, inequality and social isolation, through progressive policies, such as Universal Basic Income (UBI).

Speaker Biography

Professor Matthew Smith is Professor in History at the University of Strathclyde and the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare. He is the author of three monographs: An Alternative History of Hyperactivity: Food Additives and the Feingold Diet (Rutgers University Press, 2011); Hyperactive: The Controversial History of ADHD (Reaktion, 2012); and Another Person’s Poison: A History of Food Allergy (Columbia University Press, 2015), which was reviewed in the New York Times and given honourable mention in the Association of American Publishers’ Prose Awards for 2016. He is currently working on a monograph project on the history of social psychiatry in the United States.  Funded by an AHRC Early Career Fellowship, this project investigates how American psychiatrists and social scientists viewed the connection between mental illness and social deprivation during the decades that followed the Second World War. This funding has resulted in a special issue of Palgrave Communications (co-edited with Lucas Richert) and two edited volumes, Deinstitutionalisation and After: Post-War Psychiatry in the Western World (2016) and Preventing Mental Illness: Past, Present and Future (2018), both co-edited by Despo Kritsotaki and Vicky Long, and published in the Palgrave series, Mental Health in Historical Perspective. Professor Smith also currently co-leads (with Mike Danton) a Scottish Universities Insight Initiative project called Peace of Mind: Exploring Universal Basic Income’s Potential to Improve Mental Health.

Registration

To attend, please register at: https://forms.office.com/r/mhpkVrqy0s.

This event will take place online, via Zoom: https://nuigalway-ie.zoom.us/j/98951084778.