Religious content in the DSM-III-R glossary of technical terms.

The authors reviewed Appendix C of DSM-III-R, Glossary of Technical Terms, for its references to religion. Religion was referred to more frequently in this glossary than it is in psychiatric research. The authors conclude that although the Glossary uses religion in constructive or cautionary reminders, the high rate of illustrative case examples of psychopathology that involve religion in the Glossary indicates cultural insensitivity in interpreting religion.

Associations between dimensions of religious commitment and mental health reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry and Archives of General Psychiatry: 1978-1989.

The authors assessed all measures of religious commitment (N = 139) reported in research studies published in the American Journal of Psychiatry and Archives of General Psychiatry in 1978 through 1989 (N less than 35). For nearly two-thirds of the measures, the studies either made no hypotheses or reported no results concerning the relationship of religious commitment to mental health status. For the great majority of the measures assessed, the studies reported a positive relationship between religious commitment and mental health.

Julia Rush's diary: coping with loss in the early nineteenth century.

Julia Rush (1759-1848), wife of Benjamin Rush (1745-1813), recorded her thoughts over a 33-year period in an unpublished devotional journal. Many of the entries relate to her experience of the loss of Benjamin Rush. Although the diary is inadequate as a source of understanding psychodynamic processes at work, it provides considerable information about Julia Rush's coping behavior. An analysis of this journal reveals that she used three major coping strategies to deal with the loss of her husband: ritualized language, time marking, and cognitive reframing. These devotional meditations also illuminate the way early nineteenth-century religious views shaped Julia Rush's response to loss.

Psychiatry and social values: the American Psychiatric Association and immigration restriction, 1880-1930.

From time to time during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the issue of immigration came before the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Members of the APA who publicly discussed the problem of immigration often addressed it in ways that emphasized the importance of hereditary and racial factors in determining mental health. There was considerable feeling among psychiatrists that the immigrant population harbored a large number of "mental defectives" who would taint future generations of Americans if not restricted. Though psychiatrists were not as extreme in their advocacy of immigration restriction as some segments of American society (Grob 1983), many were nonetheless eager to see limits imposed upon the entry of defective and potentially defective immigrants, particularly those from Southern and Eastern Europe. Some practitioners were also deeply concerned about what might happen to the state of American mental health if the racial mixture of the nation's population were substantially altered. On the other hand, some psychiatrists, particularly in the period after 1910, were uncomfortable with views that emphasized hereditary determinism and therefore emphasized the role of environmental factors in the development of mental disease. The purpose of this paper is to examine how social and cultural forces interacted with contemporary scientific ideas to shape the way psychiatrists dealt with the problem of immigration at the turn of the century.