Open Psychiatric Services in Interwar France

The open psychiatric service established in Paris by Édouard Toulouse was meant to provide early, active psychiatric treatment to mildly afflicted individuals without subjecting them to legal commitment. Psychiatric reformers also hoped that the service would help to raise the status of psychiatry by tying their specialty's fate to laboratory science and hospital medicine. This article traces the genesis of open psychiatric services in interwar France and surveys the debates they engendered within the French psychiatric community. It highlights the role of World War I in the implementation of open services and in the creation of a pool of patients who required assistance.