Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Where are the nurses in the history of psychiatry? -- Chapter 1. "The backbone of every mental hospital": defining nursing in early psychiatry -- Chapter 2. "The gospel of mental hygiene": reimagining practice before WWII -- Chapter 3. "The future of nursing": creating advanced practice courses in psychiatry -- Chapter 4. "We called it talking with patients": interpersonal relations and the idea of nurses as therapists -- Chapter 5. "The number one social problem": mental health and American democracy -- Epilogue: From Alabama to DC and back again: the arcHIVes of Mary Starke Harper -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index.

"Talking Therapy traces the rise of modern psychiatric nursing in the United States from the 1930s to the 1970s. Through an analysis of the relationship between nurses and other mental health professions, with an emphasis on nursing scholarship, this book demonstrates the inherently social construction of 'mental health', and highlights the role of nurses in challenging, and complying with, modern approaches to psychiatry. After WWII, heightened cultural and political emphasis on mental health for social stability enabled the development of psychiatric nursing as a distinct knowledge project through which nurses aimed to transform institutional approaches to patient care, and to contribute to health and social science beyond the bedside. Nurses now take for granted the ideas that underpin their relationships with patients, but this book demonstrates that these were ideas not easily won, and that nurses in the past fought hard to make mental health nursing what it is today"-- Provided by publisher

Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on April 15, 2020).