The First Resort

Social psychiatry was a mid-twentieth-century approach to mental health that stressed the prevention of mental illness rather than its treatment. Matthew Smith offers a history of the rise and fall of social psychiatry that also explores the lessons this largely forgotten movement has to offer today.

Matthew Smith is professor of health history at the University of Strathclyde’s Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare. His books include Another Person’s Poison: A History of Food Allergy (Columbia, 2015) and Hyperactive: The Controversial History of ADHD (2012).

Mat Savelli, coeditor of Global Transformation in the Life Sciences, 1945–1980:
For far too long historians have written dismissively—or, worse, entirely ignored—of the contributions made by social psychiatry to the evolution of thought on mental health in the twentieth century. The First Resort explains the conditions that allowed social psychiatry to emerge and addresses the reasons it ultimately failed, highlighting both the strengths and limitations of the social psychiatry movement.

Anne Kveim Lie, University of Oslo:
The First Resort is a fascinating, well-researched, and beautifully written history of social psychiatry. As the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically exposed the ongoing costs of mental health disparities, Smith’s history is highly relevant.

Jeremy A. Greene, author of The Doctor Who Wasn’t There: Technology, History, and the Limits of Telehealth:
Carefully contextualized and urgently relevant to the exigencies of today, The First Resort is required reading for anyone seeking to understand how social disparities contribute to mental health disparities—and to rediscover a forgotten range of solutions for building a more equitable approach to treatment, prevention, and recovery.

Martin Summers, author of Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions: A History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation's Capital:
Matthew Smith has written a compelling history of social psychiatry in the United States. He expertly charts its origins, evolution, and decline over the course of the twentieth century, forcing us to reckon with the ways that our society’s glorification of the individual and the profit motive ultimately undermined the noble effort to use mental healthcare to address social inequality.

Sherry Glied, coauthor of Better But Not Well: Mental Health Policy in the U.S. since 1950:
The challenges and debates that animated social psychiatry echo in today’s conversations about the “social determinants” of health. Smith’s engaging description of the successes and, ultimately, the failures of this past attempt to ground mental health in social conditions offers important lessons to those who strive to do so now.

Mary Travis Bassett, commissioner of the New York State Department of Health:
Matthew Smith has done a great service by restoring to us the vanished history of social psychiatry. The pandemic uncovered social fissures, including large racial and ethnic divides. These should clear the way for a renaissance of social psychiatry: to have good mental health, people need decent lives.