Healing a Sick World: Psychiatric Medicine and the Atomic Age

Abstract

The onset of nuclear warfare in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had far-reaching implications for the world of medicine. The study of the A-bomb and its implications led to the launching of new fields and avenues of research, most notably in genetics and radiation studies. Far less understood and under-studied was the impact of nuclear research on psychiatric medicine. Psychological research, however, was a major focus of post-war military and civilian research into the bomb. This research and the perceived revolutionary impact of atomic energy and warfare on society, this paper argues, played an important role in the global development of post-war psychiatry. Focusing on psychiatrists in North America, Japan and the United Nations, this paper examines the reaction of the profession to the nuclear age from the early post-war period to the mid 1960s. The way psychiatric medicine related to atomic issues, I argue, shifted significantly between the immediate post-war period and the 1960s. While the early post-war psychiatrists sought to help society deal with and adjust to the new nuclear reality, later psychiatrists moved towards a more radical position that sought to resist the establishment's efforts to normalise the bomb and nuclear energy. This shift had important consequences for research into the psychological trauma suffered by victims of nuclear warfare, which, ultimately, together with other research into the impact of war and systematic violence, led to our current understanding of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Living in a Nuclear World

“…The results, too, were unforeseen, profoundly shaping the memories of victims, the worldviews of those who would connect with and study victims, and the scope of possibility for those who would deny and later regret their denial of victims and their narratives. The event could neither be contained nor forgotten (Zwigenberg, 2018).…”

Psychology as if the whole earth mattered: Nuclear threat, environmental crisis, and the emergence of planetary psychology.

“…Lifton would later build these theories of interruption and resurgence of regular psychic processes into a theory of the modern, "protean" self-building a new psychological paradigm in the shadow of catastrophe (Lifton, 1963, p. 462;Lifton, 1983Lifton, , 1993. His research also contributed significantly to the identification of posttraumatic stress disorder (Zwigenberg, 2014). Mack and Lifton seem to have been brought together by their shared engagement in psychohistory as well as their specific concern with the nuclear threat; the stark bearing of that threat helped accentuate the intersection of history and psychology.…”

“…Psychology had been an important dimension of the antinuclear medical movement from the start. One of the landmark 1962 New England Journal of Medicine articles which had launched Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) had explored the psychology of defense shelters, and that organization’s founding statement of purpose discussed the psychological effects of the nuclear threat (Leiderman & Mendelson, 1962; Zwigenberg, 2018, p. 45). In 1964, the Committee on Social Issues of the reform-minded Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, which included Robert Jay Lifton and Jerome Frank, the leading figure in American nuclear psychology, issued a report on the Psychiatric Aspects of the Prevention of Nuclear War (Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry [GAP], 1964).…”