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This article examines the psychiatric screening of U.S. soldiers during the Second World War, established by psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949), as a key moment in the public application of clinical psychiatry, as well as a turning point in Sullivan's intellectual and professional career. After a brief look at the ideas and expectations Sullivan brought to the screening system, I discuss a major problem of the screening: the mismatch between the medical concept of disease prevention and the realities of the mass screening as a public policy. As a way to highlight this mismatch, I focus on Sullivan's failure to protect homosexual men from medical and social stigmatization by screening them out of the armed forces. Despite his liberal approach to the issue of homosexuality before the war, which he had created in his clinical practice, Sullivan was unable to persuade the military and the public of gay men's right to serve the nation. The examination of how his sympathetic view of homosexuality became circumscribed reveals not only the gap between clinical insights and public policy, but also how tentative views of homosexuality in public debate among liberal psychiatrists during the decade preceding the war contributed to the failure to make non-homophobic policy in the 1940s. This article shows that the relative conservatism in the politics of sexuality among liberal psychiatrists, as well as the intransigent conservatism as seen in homophobic tradition of the Army, contributed to the discriminatory screening criteria.

This article discusses the psychiatric therapeutics of Northfield military psychiatric hospital and suggests that treatment in Northfield was characterised by ideals of citizenship typical of the period and inextricably linked to the military. The two Northfield experiments, for which Northfield has become famous, glorified the group as a social unit and promoted adaptation to the needs and values of society as the route to mental health. In the context of the Second World War, such adaptation meant accepting the duties of a soldier. In the published writings regarding the first Northfield experiment, the psychiatrist Wilfred Bion emphasised his military role in returning patients to their units, a job which he thought was best conducted by men like himself who had experience of leading men into battle. Writing about the second experiment, Tom Main emphasised the importance of including military staff in every aspect of the hospital life from therapy to administration. Some Northfield psychiatrists were less content with this strongly military approach and this led to the conflict which ended the first experiment and continued to spark disagreements throughout the hospital's existence.

Some studies in the sociology of stress conceptualize their outcome variables as distress, while others treat the same outcomes as mental disorder. This article focuses on the importance of distinguishing between the two. It argues that there are fundamental differences between distress that arises in non-disordered persons and genuine mental disorder but that studies of stress typically fail to distinguish between these conditions. The article outlines the historical developments that led the field to conflate distress and disorder. Finally, it indicates some advantages for research, treatment and policy that can accrue when distress that is initiated and maintained by social conditions is distinguished from mental disorders that are dysfunctions of internal psychological mechanisms.

Through the stimulus of war and concerns about neuropsychiatric disability, the U.S. military developed methods to rapidly screen the mental health of World War I and II draftees. Intelligence testing and brief psychiatric screening expanded the accession physical examination and underwent revision to identify only gross mental health disability. Supplemental psychiatric evaluations and written psychological screening tools were abandoned after postwar assessments; they demonstrated poor predictive power in evaluating recruit service capacity for combat environments. Currently, only three mental health accession tools are used to screen applicants before their entrance into military service, namely, educational achievement, cognitive testing, and a cursory psychiatric evaluation. The Navy and Air Force use a fourth screening measure during entry-level training. Educational attainment with high school graduation has been the strongest predictor of finishing a service term. The purpose of this article is to provide both a historical review and a review of testing efforts.

War Department Technical Bulletin, Medical 203 is presented in historical context as the first psychodynamic nomenclature. The history of Medical 203 is presented to show how Medical 203 was adapted to become DSM-I. Medical 203 then is compared and contrasted to DSM-IV to illustrate how changes in the modern DSMs have led to an 800% increase in the number of psychiatric diagnoses over the last half century. The role of critical history is emphasized in evaluating those changes and in speculating about the next 50 years of psychiatric nomenclature.

Under wing of Babinski and Pierre Marie at "La Salpétrière Hospital", André Léri (1875-1930) became a member of the Académie de Neurologie since 1904, then, Associated Professor in 1910. Between the 14-18 War, he was entrusted to run the head of medical military Districts and jumped at the chance to go deeply into war nevrosis. He sharpened exognosis diagnosis to set apart a lot of mental disorders which were before confused under the name of "brain concussion"; he listed hysteria, neurasthenia, psychosis, nevrosis and psycho-nevrosis, emotional syndromes, and clearly defined malingering.