ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the development of biological treatments for mental illness and the wider implications for psychiatry and allied disciplines in the second half of the twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on the shift from the somatic treatments practised in interwar European asylums to the psychopharmaceuticals developed in the immediate post-war decades and their subsequent impact on the conceptualisation of psychiatric disorders and the role of the clinician in treating patients’ distress. It also considers the consequences of these therapeutic developments for the status of psychoanalysis and other psychotherapies, as well as the increasing prestige of neuroscientific understandings of mental distress.
