Timeline of Mental Health

In 1946 President Harry Truman signed the National Mental Health Act, which among other things ordered the founding of the National Institute of Mental Health 3 years later. This was the largest governmental intervention into American public health so far. The NIMH is still in operation today, pushing research and training in order to "define the mechanisms of complex disorders," "chart mental illness trajectories to determine when, where, and how to intervene," "strive for prevention and cures," and "strengthen the public health impact of NIMH-supported research."

https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/nih-almanac/national-institute-mental-health-nimh

The International Congress on Mental Health was held in London in 1948 and marked both the recognition of psychiatry as a serious science, as well as the serious nature of mental health both in the individual and as a public health concern. The conference was attended by around two thousand people from fifty countries.

COHEN, J. International Congress on Mental Health. Nature 162, 441–443 (1948). https://doi.org/10.1038/162441b0

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In 1955 meprobamate began to be mass-manufactured. It was marketed as a drug to help cure "mental symptoms." It was mainly used as a tranquilizer to help people calm down. Interestingly, it was one of the first drugs to actually be marketed, and it was apparently effective enough that within two years of its release it "accounted for one third of all prescriptions." Although it was not the first drug to be administered to patients with mental illnesses, it was the first to be marketed to the public as a whole - it and other following anti-anxiety drugs were especially popular with middle-class women, to whom is was known as 'mother's little helper.'

https://www.newsweek.com/americas-long-love-affair-anti-anxiety-drugs-77967

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Consciousness raising groups hit their stride between 1960 and 1980. Although they're mainly looked at now through a political lense as a tool for the feminist movement, they gave women a chance to vent and normalize their angers and frustrations with their every-day lives. Jordanova directly refers to it as a “therapy” and Crook argues that “The focus on revealing the psychologically repressed and the emotionally intimate was critical to the feminist political project”.

Sarah Crook (2018) The women’s liberation movement, activism and therapy at the grassroots, 1968–1985, Women's History Review, 27:7, 1152-1168, DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2018.1450611

L. J. Jordanova (1981) ‘Mental Illness, Mental Health: changing norms and expectations’, in Cambridge Women’s Studies Group (Ed.) Women in Society: interdisciplinary essays (London: Virago), pp. 95–114. p. 97.

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In 1971 a British researcher found that twice as many women were prescribed mood-altering drugs than men were. Parish couldn't conclude why based on that data alone but strongly recommended that further studies be undertaken to verify his result and determine the cause.

Peter Parish (1971) ‘The prescribing of psychotropic drugs in general practice’, Journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners 21(92), pp. 1 –77.

Hysteria was a diagnosis that could be applied to almost any woman seeking medical treatment in the 19th and 20th centuries, and which was often used to dismiss women's concerns about their health. In the 19th century it was believed to be caused by issues with the womb; by the early 20th century it was largely used to mean imagined, unreal medical issues by a woman subconsciously seeking attention or simply being anxious. It was included in the original Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the standard text used to diagnose patients who were believed to suffer from maladies of the mind, in 1980.

Tasca, Cecilia & Rapetti, Mariangela & Carta, Mauro & Fadda, Bianca. (2012). Women And Hysteria In The History Of Mental Health. Clinical practice and epidemiology in mental health : CP & EMH. 8. 110-9. 10.2174/1745017901208010110.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) was formed by Congress. Interestingly, it focuses on "behavioral health" rather than purely mental health, as well as obviously focusing on substance abuse as a symptom of mental illness or even a mental illness itself.

https://www.samhsa.gov/about-us/faqs

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After 10 years of research about the ‘comorbidity crisis,’ where the current classification system had been considered increasingly confusing and outdated, the American Psychiatric Association published the DSM 5, which changed the system of mental diagnoses radically and attempted to account for the rise in comorbidity, where a single patient qualifies for multiple diagnoses.

Aragona, Massimiliano. "The Role of Comorbidity in the Crisis of the Current Psychiatric Classification System." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, vol. 16 no. 1, 2009, p. 1-11. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/ppp.0.0211.

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