Anne Boniface

Research

Dissertation

War on the Brain: The Rise and Decline of Military Psychiatry, 1917-1980

In the Second World War, the U.S. Army employed thousands of psychiatrists, and more

than two million men were excused or dismissed from military service for psychiatric reasons.

During the Vietnam War, both of those numbers dropped dramatically. Only eleven psychiatrists

served in Vietnam at any given time, and mental health cases constituted a negligible percentage of

medical evacuations and discharges. “War on the Brain” considers this reversal, explaining how

mental disorder in the army transformed from a cause for concern to a condition to be ignored. It

ties together seemingly disparate threads in modern American history and the history of science: a

newly global hegemon enamored with military force, an ambitious psychiatric profession seeking to

establish its relevance, and a widening gap between the working class and the corridors of power.

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Drawing on the personal and professional papers of psychiatrists, veterans’ oral histories,

military records, medical journals, and memoirs, the dissertation offers a narrative arc that runs

counter to popular and scholarly understandings. I argue that the army’s commitment to preventing

and treating ill mental health diminished over the course of the twentieth century’s four U.S. draft

conflicts—World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. During this time,

manpower imperatives came to eclipse concerns about service members’ welfare, and military

psychiatrists developed practices and policies reflective of those priorities as they attempted to

mitigate reported psychiatric losses and keep soldiers in uniform. Thus, at the moment when military

spending and faraway troop deployments became established facts of American life, service

members’ psychological suffering became an accepted cost of making war.