1979

Establishment of Veteran Centers for Vietnam Vets: This outreach program of outpatient clinics, headed by Arthur S. Blank, Jr., “was probably the most ambitious attempt at collective psychotherapy in history, based on an idealistic hope that mass treatment could transform the lives of up to half a million people. Yet . . . the experience in the 1920s – which, apart from Kardiner’s writing was, for some reason, completely ignored – had shown that once war veterans become chronic patients they tend not to recover, just as large caregiving bureaucracies, once assembled, tend not to dismantle themselves. . . . Nor was the inherent difficulty of applying a model of ‘trauma’ based on the stresses of battle to hundreds of thousands of people who clearly had not been in battle ever really addressed” (Shephard, 396, cf. 392).