Social and Intrapsychic Behavior Analysis
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Cameron continued his work on memory and its relationship to aging. He published a book called Remembering and extended psychiatric links to human biology. In papers published during this time he linked RNA to memory. He furthered his diagnostic definitions of clinical states such as anxiety, depression and schizophrenia. Cameron's dedication to clinical psychiatry was examined in his pedagogical writings, his establishing of new organizations of clinical services, his papers and manuals that contributed to psychotherapeutic practice.
He began to develop the discipline of social psychiatry that concentrated and examined the roles of interpersonal interaction, family, community and culture in the emergence and amelioration of emotional disturbance. Cameron invented the day hospital, where patients could visit a psychiatrist during the day and return home at night. He placed the psychiatric treatment unit inside of the hospital and inspected its success. Here in the hospital Cameron could observe how the psychiatric patient resembled patients with other diseases that were not psychiatric in nature. Through the comparison somatic causes could also be compared. The behavior of a mental patient could resemble the behavior of a patient with, for example, syphilis, and then a somatic cause could be deduced for a psychological illness. Cameron titled this procedure "intrapsychic", a term derived from the psycho-somatic relationship of hospital patients.
Cameron began to refuse the Freudian unconscious in favor of a social constructivist's view of mental illness. In Cameron's analysis, culture and society played a crucial role in the ability for one to function according to the demands necessary for human survival. Therefore, society should function to select out the weak and unwanted, those apt towards fearsome aggression that threatened society. Psychiatry would play a disciplinary role.
Cameron began to explore how industrial conditions could satisfy the population through work and what kind of person or worker is best suited to industrial conditions. A stronger personality would be able to maintain himself or herself in heavy industrial situations, he theorized, while the weaker would not be able to cope with industrial conditions. Cameron would analyze what conditions produced the stronger worker, what would be the necessary conditions to replicate this personality and to reward the stronger while disciplining the weaker. In his 1946 paper entitled Frontiers of Social Psychiatry, he used the case of World War II Germany as an example where society poisoned the minds of citizens by creating a general anxiety or neurosis.
Read more about this topic: Donald Ewen Cameron
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