High Anxieties: The Social Construction of Anxiety Disorders

Anxiety has always been part of the human condition, with accounts of its various manifestations, including acute shyness and stage fright, dating back to classical antiquity. Nonetheless, since the end of the Second World War, reported levels of anxiety have risen alarmingly. At the beginning of the 21st century, anxiety disorders constitute the most prevalent mental health problem around the globe, afflicting millions of people. What social factors account for this stunning development in the mental health field during the past half century? Some observers target the ever increasing pace and demands of modern life. Nonetheless, a larger body of evidence suggests that the prevalence of anxiety is due less to these pressures themselves than to a prevailing social ethos that teaches people that anxiety-related symptoms are a socially and medically legitimate response to life in the modern age.

The Surprising History of Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder

The history of passive-aggressive personality disorder (PAPD) reveals many things about American psychiatry, including how its use and understanding of diagnostic categories have in recent decades changed. The disorder is thus a useful litmus test for establishing whether categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) have undergone a type of “diagnostic bracket creep” (Peter Kramer's term) with significant effects on the wider culture. The history of PAPD also allows us to assess whether psychiatry has encroached on routine traits and everyday practices, pathologizing behavior that was once considered normal. While the expansion of the DSM has generated widespread commentary and analysis, less has been written about PAPD, including how it came to be recognized and why its diagnostic parameters expanded so dramatically in each edition of the DSM. After tracing its roots to World War II, the essay reveals how the disorder came to be applied to ever-larger numbers of the civilian population. Original research drives the argument: previously unpublished memoranda from the American Psychiatric Association's archive that not only reveal the back-story to the disorder's expansion, but also cast new light on the organization's methodology, including its practical and theoretical difficulties in differentiating normal from pathological behavior.

Argument and Identity Change in the Atlantic Security Community

US Assessments of Japanese Ground Warfare Tactics and the Army's Campaigns in the Pacific Theatres, 1943—1945: Lessons Learned and Methods Applied

The article examines the evolution of US intelligence assessments of the Imperial Japanese Army's tactical methods during the Pacific War, and explains how the resulting perceptions influenced the development of American doctrine for fighting the Japanese. It argues that US evaluations of the Japanese were characterized primarily by the need to gain a realistic understanding of enemy fighting capabilities, coupled with a realization of the need to improve the army's techniques for fighting a successful campaign.

The Pre-history of the Non-Aligned Movement

This article focuses on the pre-history of the Non-Aligned Movement and of the friendship between Pandit Nehru and Tito from Yugoslavia. It explores the various levels of contacts between Indians and Yugoslavs in the second half of the 1940s, among communists, diplomats, United Nations delegation members and participants of a Yugoslav trade delegation to South Asia. Special attention is given to the question of why Yugoslavia was a rather uninteresting or even hostile country to India in the years immediately after the end of World War II, but grew to be an attractive partner in the aftermath of Tito's break with Stalin, when the country tried to survive between the Anglo–American and Soviet blocs

Consumer Perception of Food‐Borne Illness Risks Before and After the 2006 E. Coli Events

Late in 2006 there were two well‐publicized outbreaks of Escherichia coli 0157:H7 in the United States. One is traced back to contaminated spinach and the other is connected to contaminated lettuce. By looking at the relative rankings of food‐borne illness relative to other risks (i.e., war or terrorism, accidents at home, accidents away from home, environmental disaster, natural disaster, and infectious diseases), changes that occurred following the outbreaks are examined. Risks are defined for the project participants as the chance of sudden, unexpected injury, illness, or death. Changes in consumer behavior and attitude are also examined. The ranking of risks associated with food‐borne illness increases significantly following the outbreaks, but behaviors and attitudes do not change significantly. The media play a role in increasing awareness. People who listen to news on TV or on the radio daily have significant changes in their ranking of food‐borne illness risk; however, those that do not listen to media news as often do not have significant differences in their responses. Gender, age, and the presence of children in the home also mattered in determining significant changes in the ranking of food‐borne illnesses.

Are ‘New Wars’ More Atrocious? Battle Severity, Civilians Killed and Forced Migration Before and After the End of the Cold War

It is widely believed that the human impact of civil conflict in the present era is especially destructive. Proponents of the ‘new wars’ thesis hold that today’s conflicts are fuelled by exclusive identities, motivated by greed in the absence of strong states, and unchecked by the disinterested great powers, resulting in increased battle severity, civilian death and displacement. The ratio of civilian to military casualties is claimed to have tilted, so that the overwhelming majority of those killed today are civilians. Using systematic data that are comparable across cases and over time we find that, contrary to the ‘new wars’ thesis, the human impact of civil conflict is considerably lower in the post-Cold War period. We argue that this pattern reflects the decline of ideological conflict, the restraining influence of globalization on governments, and the increasing rarity of superpower campaigns of destabilization and counter-insurgency through proxy warfare.

Comic Plots as Conflict Resolution Strategy

Recently, the ‘war stories’ of the leaders of the major Western powers — the United States, Britain and France — have adhered to two major plots: the heroic epic or the sad tragedy. The heroic script defines and explains conflicts in which the Western powers have wished to play an active role: the Persian Gulf (1990—1), Kosovo (1999) and the current war against terrorism. The tragic plot has been employed when they have ruled out forceful outside intervention, like in Bosnia (1992—5) and Rwanda (1994). Both scripts are highly problematic conflict resolution approaches: they point to black-and-white, aggressive denouements. An alternative is the comic plot: a story traditionally used in ordinary disagreements among friends, problems with ‘small foes’ and disputes with important rivals. Adopting a comic framework for most of the conflicts in the world would give the Western leaders more room to negotiate, to try out new ideas and to back down on unsuccessful strategies.

A Qualitative Study of Mental Health Problems among Children Displaced by War in Northern Uganda

While multiple studies have found that children affected by war are at increased risk for a range of mental health problems, little research has investigated how mental health problems are perceived locally. In this study we used a previously developed rapid ethnographic assessment method to explore local perceptions of mental health problems among children and adults from the Acholi ethnic group displaced by the war in northern Uganda. We conducted 45 free list interviews and 57 key informant interviews. The rapid assessment approach appears to have worked well for interviewing caretakers and children aged 10-17 years. We describe several locally defined syndromes: two tam/par/kumu (depression and dysthymia-like syndromes), ma lwor (a mixed anxiety and depression-like syndrome), and a category of conduct problems referred to as kwo maraco/gin lugero. The descriptions of these local syndromes were similar to western mood, anxiety and conduct disorders, but included culture-specific elements.

What's in a Name?: Alcohol and Drug Treatment and the Politics of Confusion

Aims The aim of this article is to investigate the use of a rather vague medical conceptual framework within the compulsory treatment of alcohol and drug users in Sweden during the 20th century. The focus lies on exploring how a phenomenon came to be described as pathological, what the causes are for certain actions being suddenly interpreted in medical terms, and what consequences that might lead to.Design Supported by theoretical speculations on medicalization processes and conceptual history, two empirical cases (the compulsory care of alcohol abusers in the 1950s and the legislative process leading to psychiatric compulsory care of drug users in the late 1960s) are investigated. The first case draws mainly upon official reports and archive material from alcohol treatment institutions, whilst the second case is built from reading official reports and parliamentary material. The research task for the two empirical cases has not quite been the same: whereas the first case is illustrated by the discrepancies between the labelling of treatment activities and the treatment actually carried out, the second case rather draws upon the enlargement of the field of signification of the disease concept to cover most aspects of drug use.Results A medicalization process on different levels is traced both in the post-war compulsory treatment of alcohol abusers as well as the compulsory psychiatric care for drug abusers that was introduced from the late 1960s onwards.Conclusion The investigated cases show how the medicalization processes benefited from conceptual vagueness, leading to a widening of the conceptual dimensions of both the treatment and disease concepts. In this, the medicalization of alcohol abuse in the 1950s and drug abuse in the 1960s made way for a paternalistic justification of compulsory care measures that might otherwise have become politically troublesome.