TY - JOUR
T1 - Origins of Difference
T2 - Professionalization, Power, and Mental Hygiene in Canada and the United States
AU - Armstrong-Hough, Mari
N1 - Funding Information:
The roots of this early membership difference lay in the story of C.K. Clarke’s outpatient clinic, a cause around which many of the CNCMH founders had gathered earlier in the century. His early attempt to reach beyond the asylum was located in Toronto, under the auspices of the Toronto General Hospital. The financing of the clinic, however, fell outside the regular hospital budget. Due to a combination of professional politics and Clarke’s unusual beliefs regarding the potential contagion of mental illness, the clinic had to be located away from the main hospital (Dowbiggin 1997; Richardson 1989). For this reason, Clarke was unable to procure funding from the general hospital budget (Richardson 1989). Instead, he sought financial support from the hospital’s Social Services Auxiliary—thus placing Canadian psychiatry’s first excursion out of the asylum and into public health under the administrative auspices of social services, rather than of professional medicine.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 ACSUS.
PY - 2015/4/3
Y1 - 2015/4/3
N2 - This study examines the emergence and development of mental hygiene professional organizations in Canada and the US by analyzing discursive differences in the publications of two sister committees: the National Committee for Mental Hygiene and the Canadian National Committee for Mental Hygiene. The analysis finds that while mental hygiene in North America initially emerged as a single, shared continental professional discourse, the two movements diverged in critical ways for reasons directly related to their institutional contexts and donor bases. Even as US popular and political discourse veered towards eugenic policies, the US mental hygiene discourse shifted sharply away from eugenics. In contrast, in Canada, mental hygiene publications focused increasingly on the moral dangers of Canadas immigrant population and played a role in producing scientific legitimacy for eugenic policies. This analysis suggests that the different trajectories of the two professional communities have their origins in organizations membership and donor bases, not broader differences in national character.
AB - This study examines the emergence and development of mental hygiene professional organizations in Canada and the US by analyzing discursive differences in the publications of two sister committees: the National Committee for Mental Hygiene and the Canadian National Committee for Mental Hygiene. The analysis finds that while mental hygiene in North America initially emerged as a single, shared continental professional discourse, the two movements diverged in critical ways for reasons directly related to their institutional contexts and donor bases. Even as US popular and political discourse veered towards eugenic policies, the US mental hygiene discourse shifted sharply away from eugenics. In contrast, in Canada, mental hygiene publications focused increasingly on the moral dangers of Canadas immigrant population and played a role in producing scientific legitimacy for eugenic policies. This analysis suggests that the different trajectories of the two professional communities have their origins in organizations membership and donor bases, not broader differences in national character.
KW - Canada
KW - eugenics
KW - mental hygiene
KW - professional communities
KW - professionalization
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U2 - 10.1080/02722011.2015.1043564
DO - 10.1080/02722011.2015.1043564
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84943569866
SN - 0272-2011
VL - 45
SP - 208
EP - 225
JO - American Review of Canadian Studies
JF - American Review of Canadian Studies
IS - 2
ER -