<p dir="ltr">My dissertation, “Locating Mental Illness Treatment Experiences in Indianapolis, 1945-1975” examines this therapeutic revolution in mental illness treatment at an important historical and geographic crossroads. As opposed to the current focus on de-institutionalization, I propose a new conceptual model of <i>re-institutionalization </i>to understand the multi-level experience in mental illness treatments during the transitional period. Re-institutionalization is a conceptual framework for locating the therapeutic revolution in mental illness treatment by layering the dramatic expansion of the places and modes of treatment within an embodied therapeutic landscape. The dynamic changes of the therapeutic landscape in Indianapolis stand as a metonym for systemic changes in which mental health care was integrated into medical health care not through the closing of institutions but through creation and redefinition. My findings demonstrate that re-institutionalization in Indianapolis was characterized by 1) the development of governmentally funded institutions to improve the treatment of the mentally ill, 2) the development of therapy in-patient, out-patient, and community mental hospitals and clinics, 3) the differentiation and professionalization of therapeutic modalities, 4) primacy of a clinician diagnosis of mental illness, 5) patient’s acceptance of therapeutic identity as mentally ill.</p><p dir="ltr">Indianapolis was both emblematic of the broader therapeutic revolution in mental illness treatment and specifically significant in the development of biopsychiatry. Indianapolis leaders embraced biopsychiatry as a pragmatic path between the psychodynamic focus on unconscious desires and neuropsychiatric focus on structural and electrical models of the nervous system. Indianapolis was the home of pathbreaking neurotransmitter research at Eli Lilly Pharmaceuticals, Indiana University Medical Center, and the National Institute for Mental Health-funded laboratories at the Institute of Psychiatric Research. Strong legislative, philanthropic, hospital, and university leadership shaped Indiana’s plans with surprisingly little connection to the federal government’s mental health initiatives.</p>

This thesis examines the ways in which the British mandate conceptualised, encountered, and sought to manage mental illness in Palestine between 1920 and 1948. The subject of mental illness has hitherto received partial consideration by historians interested in the Yishuv, who treat this period as formative for the Israeli mental health service. This thesis shifts the focus from European Jewish psychiatrists to the British mandate's engagements with mental illness, thus contributing to the well-developed literature on colonial psychiatry. Where this thesis departs from many of these institutionally-focussed histories of colonial psychiatry is in its source base; lacking hospital case files or articles in psychiatric journals, this thesis draws on an eclectic range of material from census reports and folklore research to petitions and prison records. In bringing together these strands of the story of psychiatry and mental illness, this thesis seeks to move beyond the continued emphasis in the historiography of Palestine on politics, nationalism, and state-building, and to develop our understanding of state and society by examining how they interacted in relation to the question of mental illness. This thesis thus widens the cast of historical actors from psychiatric experts alone to take in policemen, census officials, and families. In addition, this thesis seeks to situate Palestine within wider mandatory, British imperial, and global contexts, not to elide specificities, but to resist a persistent historiographical tendency to treat Palestine as exceptional. The first part traces the development of British mandatory conceptualisations of mental illness through the census of 1931 and then through a focus on specific causes of mental illness thought to be at work in Palestine. The second part examines two contexts in which the mandate was brought into contact with the mentally ill: the law and petitions. The final part of the thesis explores two distinct therapeutic regimes introduced in this period: patient work and somatic treatments.