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The Rockefeller Foundation directs significant funding to psychiatry.

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The Story of Disability Justice
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Up until this point, psychiatry has been an outlier field. Funding for research and teaching from the Rockefeller Foundation shifts this field to becoming a prominent part of medicine.

To justify this shift, the head of the Medical Sciences Division argues that the costs associated with mental illness are "tremendous and oppressive." In New York, for example, more than a third of the state budget (apart from debt service) is spent on the care of the mentally "defective and diseased."

In tackling this issue, the Rockefeller Foundation reasoned that: "Because teaching was poor, research was fragmentary and application was feeble and incomplete... the first problem was to strengthen the teaching of psychiatry" (Scull, 2022).