Human Salvage: Psychiatry in the Second World War

Lecture by Dr Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen, Associate Professor, University of Newcastle, Australia.

In this lecture I discuss the expansion of Anglo-American psychiatric theory and practice during the Second World War and its implications for the massification of psychiatry in the post-war decades. In contrast to the shell shock experience of the First World War, in this new and vastly more destructive conflict wartime psychiatry spread beyond the battlefield to include significant numbers of non-combatants and civilians as well. By examining the encounters between clinicians and an array of patient cohorts forged by wartime – enlisted personnel, bombed civilians, children, veterans, displaced persons, and Holocaust survivors – I trace how psychiatric practice evolved towards a ‘salvage’ mindset that informed ‘psy’ therapeutics after the war.