TY - JOUR
T1 - Residential treatment and the invention of the emotionally disturbed child in twentieth-century America
AU - Doroshow, Deborah Blythe
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016, Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.
PY - 2016/3/1
Y1 - 2016/3/1
N2 - In the 1930s, children who were violent, depressed, psychotic, or suicidal would likely have been labeled delinquent and sent to a custodial training school for punitive treatment. But starting in the 1940s, a new group of institutions embarked on a new experiment to salvage and treat severely deviant children. In the process, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers at these residential treatment centers (RTCs) made visible, and indeed invented, a new patient population. This article uses medical literature, popular media, and archival sources from several RTCs to argue that staff members created what they called the “emotionally disturbed” child. While historians have described the identification of the mildly “troublesome” child in child guidance clinics, I demonstrate how a much more severely ill child was identified and defined in the process of creating residential treatment and child mental health as a professional enterprise.
AB - In the 1930s, children who were violent, depressed, psychotic, or suicidal would likely have been labeled delinquent and sent to a custodial training school for punitive treatment. But starting in the 1940s, a new group of institutions embarked on a new experiment to salvage and treat severely deviant children. In the process, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers at these residential treatment centers (RTCs) made visible, and indeed invented, a new patient population. This article uses medical literature, popular media, and archival sources from several RTCs to argue that staff members created what they called the “emotionally disturbed” child. While historians have described the identification of the mildly “troublesome” child in child guidance clinics, I demonstrate how a much more severely ill child was identified and defined in the process of creating residential treatment and child mental health as a professional enterprise.
KW - Child psychiatry
KW - Emotionally disturbed
KW - Mental illness
KW - Residential treatment
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84962082069&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1353/bhm.2016.0023
DO - 10.1353/bhm.2016.0023
M3 - Article
C2 - 27040027
AN - SCOPUS:84962082069
SN - 0007-5140
VL - 90
SP - 92
EP - 123
JO - Bulletin of the History of Medicine
JF - Bulletin of the History of Medicine
IS - 1
ER -