Albert Deutsch

Who was Albert Deutsch?

Albert Deutsch was a journalist and social historian.

Deutsch was born on the lower East Side of New York City to immigrant parents. He attended public schools but dropped out of high school and for a number of years he traveled throughout the United States supporting himself by working as a longshoreman, a farm worker, and a shipyard worker. He continued to educate himself in biography and history by visiting public libraries.

He returned to New York City in the early 1930s. In 1934, he secured a position as an archivist-researcher with the New York State Department of Public Welfare, which was writing a history of the welfare period from 1867 to 1940. The book was published in 1942. While researching for this book, he found material about the public care of the mentally ill and he approached the National Foundation for Mental Health with a proposal to prepare a history of psychiatry in the United States. He proposed to co-author the book with Clifford Beers, Secretary of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene and the author of the acclaimed book The Mind that Found Itself, published in 1909. The relationship between Deutsch and Beers was stormy.