ABOUT THIS BOOK

First place in the 2020 American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award in History and Public Policy
Winner of the 2020 Lavinia L. Dock Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing

Talking Therapy traces the rise of modern psychiatric nursing in the United States from the 1930s to the 1970s. Through an analysis of the relationship between nurses and other mental health professions, with an emphasis on nursing scholarship, this book demonstrates the inherently social construction of ‘mental health’, and highlights the role of nurses in challenging, and complying with, modern approaches to psychiatry. After WWII, heightened cultural and political emphasis on mental health for social stability enabled the development of psychiatric nursing as a distinct knowledge project through which nurses aimed to transform institutional approaches to patient care, and to contribute to health and social science beyond the bedside. Nurses now take for granted the ideas that underpin their relationships with patients, but this book demonstrates that these were ideas not easily won, and that nurses in the past fought hard to make mental health nursing what it is today.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

KYLIE SMITH is an assistant professor and the Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow for nursing and the humanities at Emory University in Atlanta. She is the co-editor of Hegemony: Studies in Consensus and Coercion and Nursing History for Contemporary Role Development.

REVIEWS

"Talking Therapy is thoughtful, well-written, and covers much new ground. Her treatment of gender strikes me as having perfect pitch, and her analysis is well-grounded in psychiatric historiography, aware of both classics and recent work."

— Jonathan Sadowsky, author of Depression: A History

"In this engaging and essential book, Kylie Smith restores psychiatric nurses to their central place in the history of mental health, chronicling their struggles for professional legitimacy as they cared for the afflicted while entering a larger conversation focused on healing the nation’s damaged psyche."

— Elizabeth Lunbeck, author of The Americanization of Narcissism

"This incredible book is a much-needed addition to the history of nursing scholarship, but more so to the history of caring for those with mental illnesses. Smith illustrates how ideas about caregiving for this historically marginalized population informed not only psychiatric nursing but nursing more broadly. The book will help current day practitioners examine the underpinnings of their own ideas of caring for mentally ill patients."

— Julie Fairman, author of Making Room in the Clinic

"Talking Therapy is thus a valuable contribution to the history of twentieth-century American psychiatry and mental health, moving nurses from the margins to the center of that history. It highlights the complex, intersecting, and shifting relationship between nurses and psychiatrists; the intellectual and political work nurses have done to transform patient care; and the interprofessional, gender, racial, and knowledge politics that continue to shape the American health care system."

— Bulletin of the History of Medicine

"Smith has the complicated task of bringing together two major areas of secondary literature—the history of nursing and the history of psychiatry....Smith raises important questions and her book is among the first to fill the enormous void in the history of nurses in psychiatry [and] it is a mark of the value of Smith's Talking Therapy that she has generated more questions than she can answer. We can look forward to works by Smith and other future scholars to further elucidate the critical role of nurses in psychiatry."

— Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1          “The backbone of every mental hospital”: Defining nursing in early psychiatry

2          “The Gospel of Mental Hygiene”: Reimagining practice before WWII

3          “The Future of Nursing”: Creating Advanced Practice Courses in Psychiatry

4          “We called it talking with patients”: Interpersonal Relations and the Idea of Nurses as Therapists

5          “The number one social problem”: Mental Health and American Democracy

Conclusion
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index