Our archivist Russell Johnson is working to preserve the history of public mental health in California, including many of the documents presented on this site, by preserving and organizing the physical materials so they will be available to researchers in the future.
 
Our Neuroscience History Archive also includes the personal papers and oral histories of many psychiatrists and neuroscientists who have helped us to better understand the brain and how it works.
 
Also visit our new Leo Rangell site, at www.leorangell.org.  Dr. Leo Rangell (1913-2011) was a leading American psychoanalyst, writer and teacher, and a charismatic leader in his field.  He championed the insights of Freudian and humanistic psychatiry in an era increasingly dominated by antipsychotic drugs.  Rangell authored 450 papers and nine books, taught at UCLA and UCSF for 50 years, and continued to see patients until the last days of his life.  In his final book,in The Road to Unity in Psychoanalytic Theory, Dr. Rangell undertook the heroic task of creating a unified Freudian synthesis of the multiple psychoanalytic schools — Adlerian, Sullivanian, Kleinian, Kohutian, Reichian — a project which many of his colleagues considered impossible, but which he saw as crucial to re-establishing the influence and credibility of his field.
 
Finally, through our collaboration with the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, we are collecting historical materials on the history of the development and assessment of neuropsychiatric drugs.  Since the 1950s, these agents have played a crucial role in improving treatment, facilitating deinstitutionalization, and aiding the recovery of many mental health clients.  But many questions have been raised regarding the best measures of outcomes, the transparency of drug evaluation, the long-term risks of side effects.  Our research will examine the history of these questions.  The ACNP archive now holds the organizational records of the ACNP and the personal papers of leading neuropsychopharmacologists such as Frank Berger, Joel Elkes, and Heinz Lehmann.