25 years after re-unification of Germany: An overview on Eastern German psychiatry. Part 2: Pluralistic approaches and the collapse in the 1980s

This is the second part of a 2-part study of the history of psychiatry in East Germany, i.e. the Soviet Occupied Zone and later German Democratic Republic. This part primarily covers the 1970s and 1980s. Starting from the 1970s, pluralistic views on and approaches to mental illness and its treatment gained ground, which was especially visible in psychotherapy. The exacerbating economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s led to a steadily worsening collapse of the building infrastructure of clinics and any reformation that would have led to significant financial investment became impossible. Despite attempts from party and state, psychiatric institutions successfully resisted being systematically misused against their patients. In the discussion part, the study supports the notion that East German psychiatry was neither totally isolated nor communist in nature. Even though communism had an influence, it did not have a decisively modifying impact on psychiatry, so that one can characterize psychiatry in East Germany as a medical discipline with a certain specific typology.