Bedside and Community by Diana J. Mansell

Author:Diana J. Mansell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History of Medicine
ISBN: 9781773850757
Publisher: University of Calgary Press
Published: 2020-01-14T20:46:05+00:00

Health, Mental Health, and Psychopathology

From its earliest days, the department was involved in research on what was referred to as “abnormal psychology” in most universities but was called “psychopathology” at the University of Calgary. The new PhD program, when it came on stream, included a separate program in the field of psychopathology, later referred to as the “program in experimental psychopathology.” The choice was rather unique, reflecting the research interests of David Gibson in what was then still called “mental retardation,” and the faculty’s adherence to a concept of psychopathology that was based on a behaviourist model favoured by those who were graduates of British universities. The transition from research in experimental psychopathology to a full-fledged, accredited clinical psychology program would take more than twenty years, and would not occur without multiple disagreements and conflicts.41 However, during this period many faculty members would at one time or another be deeply involved in health-related activities at a clinical, administrative, or research level. This is still very much the case today.42

Why the interest in health and clinical psychology, broadly conceived? None of this was accidental, as the Department of Psychology was very much in tune with the discipline as a whole, and influences on the discipline included the changing missions of universities, market pressures, and the massive restructuring of health care and medicine in North America in the post–Second World War era.43 To date there is no written critical history of psychology and its unique location in health care. There are, however, plenty of celebratory histories that attempt to draw a line back to the origins of psychology and demonstrate psychology’s health-care “interests” as far back as the nineteenth century.44 However, this is to miss the essential features of psychology’s history. Beginning its life as a form of philosophical research in Germany in the late nineteenth century, the discipline did not become anything resembling the modern science of psychology until it had crossed the Atlantic and settled in the large American universities.45 In this context, American psychologists who had studied in Germany left behind the fledgling enterprise they had learned in Leipzig under psychology’s founder, Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), and began a promising discipline that could solve social problems, the kind of social problems encountered in the rapidly urbanizing, industrial United States of the period.46

The new practical and applied science of psychology that was fostered in the United States did not fully come to fruition until after the Second World War, for many reasons.47 It was only then that the branches of psychology most closely allied to health care, clinical psychology and health psychology/behavioural medicine, began to take shape. The idea of a specialized health psychology that supported a new professional designation with its own research agenda, journals, organizations, conferences, and university training programs was uniquely related to at least four developments in the 1960s and ’70s, in what was then referred to as the First World or sometimes just “the West.”48 First, the prevalence of chronic illnesses increased substantially as many acute illnesses were successfully treated with antibiotics, vaccines, and other preventative approaches.

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