‘Violent Men Among Us’: Psychiatry and American Violence in the Long 1960s

From the early 1960s until the end of the Vietnam War, the problem of abstracted violence acquired new saliency in the political culture of the United States. In this paper I consider the place of psychiatry in public discussions of American violence, as well as how this mobilisation of psychiatric knowledge both reflected and impelled controversies within the discipline.

Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Newcastle, where she recently finished an ARC DECRA fellowship on the uses of psychiatry during the Second World War. She is completing two monographs under contract: on psychiatry and suffering during the Second World War, and on the history of the idea of mental health.

Join us in person at Burwood or Waurn Ponds, or online via zoom.