At least since the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been increasing attention paid to the dire and ever-worsening state of mental health in this country, particularly among children and adolescents. Those of us who work on high school and college campuses are confronted on a daily basis with the ways in which mental health struggles shape the lives of a growing number of the country’s youth. This panel brings together historians of education, gender and the body, race, and medicine and the human sciences to discuss psychiatry’s efforts to diagnose and treat mothers and children over the course of the twentieth century. Our panelists explore how the field of psychiatry has grappled with diagnosing particular demographics – babies and toddlers, pregnant and postpartum women, white teenage girls, black schoolchildren – and how psychiatrists more generally have tackled the question of mental illness in childhood. By exploring the histories of specific diagnoses (Anorexia, PPD, Conduct Disorders) as well as rooting the rise of psychiatric medicine within its larger cultural context, the panelists will engage in a conversation about how struggles to define and diagnose mental illness have shaped the lives of mothers and children as well as impacting wider society. In an era when psychiatry has fully embraced the biological or ‘brain-based’ model of mental illness, this panel aims to historicize and contextualize the meaning of mental illness in modern society. The panelists will each speak briefly about their individual research projects to frame a longer, open conversation about historicizing the etiology, diagnosis and treatment of mental illness in mothers and their children.