Mental Health Reform and the American Presidency, 1970-2000. (360G-Wellcome-103277_Z_13_Z)

This research project, which informs a new monograph I am writing for Rutgers University Press, entitled 'Voices of Health and Illness: Medicine, Psychiatry, and American Culture, 1970-2000', examines mental health care reform during five modern United States presidencies: those of Bill Clinton (1993-2000), Ronald Reagan (1981-89), Jimmy Carter (1977-81), Gerald Ford (1974-77) and Richard Nixon (1969-74). The substantial body of healthcare reform papers housed in these five presidential librari es will provide the historical spine for my monograph, which traces and analyses the development of mental health provision during the last thirty years of the twentieth century. While Presidents Carter and Clinton, and particularly the First Ladies, Rosalynn Carter and Hillary Clinton, were very serious about healthcare, I will contrast these two Democratic administrations with more piecemeal reforms during three Republican administrations, focusing on Nixon's and Ford's attempts to redress the cost of President Johnson's landmark healthcare legislation and Reagan's move away from Carter's Mental Health Systems Act of 1980. My project will assess to what extent this Act - the product of Carter's Presidential Commission on Mental Health (1977-78) - was revived by the Clinton administration in the late 1990s, when mental health care surfaced once again as a priority.