New Approaches to Patient Work and Occupation

Abstract

Freebody demonstrates how new theories regarding the therapeutic use of occupation, developed during the early twentieth century in Germany and the USA, were received very differently by French and English psychiatrists, highlighting the disparity in their respective interpretations of mental disorder. In England, where psychiatrists had come to regard mental disorder holistically after World War I, the new approaches were adopted as curative treatments. French psychiatrists, the majority of whom maintained their belief in the physiological nature of mental disorder, largely ignored the new theories. In England, occupational therapy (either in the form of arts and crafts or of carefully allocated and supervised work around the hospital) became the hallmark of a modern hospital. In France, patient work remained much as it had done before World War I, with the exception of the Henri Rousselle Hospital in Paris.