Communicative Self-Harm: War, NHS and Social Work

Abstract

Abstract In 1944, Henderson’s and Gillespie’s Textbook of Psychiatry notes the ‘remarkable progress that has occurred in psychiatry in recent years in the teeth of war conditions, and even, to a limited extent, because of them’.1 The Second World War nurtures and catalyses a large number of reforms and innovations in the thought and practice of British psychiatry. Attending to the psychological casualties of the Second World War generates a huge number of interpersonally focused psychotherapeutic practices. The psychological significance of personal relationships, of adjustment to situations, of communication and social interaction become central to the linked aims of maintaining military and civilian morale on one hand, and returning psychological casualties to service as soon as possible on the other. The link between the social setting and psychological well-being is not generated by the war. However, the war does give an enormous boost to conceptions of what becomes known as the ‘psychosocial’.