Project Details
Projekt
Sick me - healing community? The "depressive person" as a social project in the GDR from 1945 to 1975. A therapeutic and social history of depression under socialism
Subject Area
Modern and Contemporary History
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 554474344
At the beginning of the 1950s, the GDR set out on the "planned path" to a better future. The forced process of building up socialism demanded the greatest commitment and the highest efforts not only from the functional elite, but from the entire population. However, there were people who failed to meet the challenges of this new society and the demands of a "new man". Depressive people, for example, with their typical symptoms such as sadness and listlessness, represented a deviation from the propagated social dynamics. We are interested in how those people were dealt with who, due to their illness, were barely or not at all able to participate in the advancing socialist project. At the centre of the project is the "depressive person", who was unable to meet the daily demands of the GDR working society and could not muster the prescribed optimism. We are investigating discourses and attributions associated with depressive people at all relevant levels: in the politics and administration of the party and state, in the "security organs", in the academic and scientific field - and above all at the place of treatment, in our case the Clinic for Psychiatry and Neurology at the University of Halle (Saale). The aim is to reveal individual perceptions and collective norms that make it possible to understand the borderline issues of adaptation and deviance, tolerance and support, stigmatisation and pathologisation, and medical treatment with and without medication. We rely on an extraordinary source material: the patient files of the University Clinic for Psychiatry and Neurology, which have been completely preserved and elaborately conserved. A sample of around 4,000 patient files of the "depression" diagnosis family was obtained for the period under investigation, from the end of National Socialism and the post-war phase in 1945, through the stabilisation and recovery period of the 1960s to the mid-1970s. These allow both a quantitative and a qualitative approach to answering the following sub-questions: 1. "Topography" of depressive illnesses in the Halle region: What spatial localisations, temporal progression curves and social distributions can be identified from the quantitative analysis of the medical records? 2. Therapeutic interactions: How did "depressive" patients and treating physicians interact on the ward? 3. Self- and external narratives: How did people diagnosed as depressed understand themselves? How were they, their illness and their social environment perceived by the therapists? 4. Social interactions: How did the everyday lives of depressed people in the collective society of the GDR develop between ideological demands, social relationships, therapeutic measures and repressive experiences?
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
Austria
Cooperation Partners
Professor Dr. Gerhard Benetka; Professor Dr. Rainer Gries
