The Afterlives of Mental Hygiene: Psychiatrizing Society in Socialist Yugoslavia

Summary This article explores the ‘afterlives’ of the mental hygiene movement in Yugoslavia, by considering two periods of time (the immediate post-WWII period and the early 1960s onwards). Despite the favourable ideological conditions, during which authorities sought to refashion healthcare in the direction of social prophylaxis in order to build socialism, practitioners in the immediate post-war era did not embrace socially focussed psychiatry, instead retreating to focus on the clinic and the brain. From the early 1960s, however, many Yugoslav clinicians embraced the social psychiatry movement. In their work, they articulated the notion that improving the mental health of individuals could benefit society, and that refashioning society could equally prevent mental illness. This ‘second afterlife’ of mental hygiene thus proved much more successful than the first. Yet rather than seeing their discipline as a tool to support the state and its aims, social psychiatrists critiqued the conditions of life within socialist Yugoslavia.