Does "Rugged Individualism" Undermine Mental Health?

After the Second World War, there was a pronounced shift in mental health thinking towards seeing society, rather than the individual, as the focus of psychiatric efforts, especially those aimed at preventing mental illness. As the title of a 1950 collection of essays by American social scientist and Rockefeller administrator, Lawrence K. Frank—Society as Patient—indicates, many mental health professionals and academics believed that focusing only on the individual was not only inefficient and costly, but also disregarded broader truths about the nature of mental illness itself.