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From Asylum to Community: Mental Health Policy in Modern America. By Gerald N. Grob. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. xviii + 406 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-691-04790-1.)
Having covered the history of mental illness in the United States from earliest times to 1940 in two earlier volumes, the author of this present work, Gerald N. Grob, is eminently qualified to trace mental health policy in the crucial years from the 1940s to the 1970s. Until the era of World War II, it was assumed that mental hospitals operated by states were the logical institutions to provide care and treatment for the mentally ill. The experiences of World War II convinced many psychiatrists that neuropsychiatric disorders were more serious than previously thought, that...