Background

Warm interest in fellow human beings
Johan Cullberg studied medicine and got his degree as a physician during the late fifties. He has always taken a warm interest in his fellow human beings, an interest that has influenced his choice of career and professional life. As a young doctor, Cullberg was fascinated by psychiatry and considered going into psychosomatic medicine, i.e. the interaction between body and soul. This fascination was reflected in his doctoral thesis, which was focused on the association between the sex hormones and the psyche.

Meeting women who lost their babies
Early in his professional life Cullberg met several women who had lost their babies during childbirth. He was struck by the intensity in the traumatic experiences of these women, and the massive aftereffect brought into their lives.

- A comparison is a forest swept over by a hurricane. A tremendous force battered the trees to the ground. Most of them could not resist the force, but snapped and broke into pieces. Some trees bent all the way down to the ground, yet they did not break but were able to slowly straighten up again. Some single trees stood straight up during the hurricane and were soon able to continue growing.

"The time at the the women´s clinic taught me so much"
Cullberg was educated in child psychiatry, something he has had great use of also when working with adult patients.
- All of us have been children, and the grown-up individual has matured from the small child´s experiences.
He was soon offered a job at the women´s clinic at the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden.

- These years taught me so much, they were the university of life. I met women who had faced tremendously difficult situations, including grief and loss. Some had experienced surgery and removal of vital organs, which had influenced their identity as a woman. Others had hard experiences associated to their pregnancy or childbirth. The individuals I met, and their way of coping with their situation, provided a lifelong interest in crises and crises management.

At the women´s ward, Cullberg met individuals in need of psychiatric care. This help was available at the ward, and it was not a big deal to talk to a psychiatrist. This was not typical for the situation during the sixties, says Cullberg. Instead, the psychiatric care was somewhat isolated and people refrain from seeking help. When they eventually did contact the psychiatric care, they had lived with their problems for a long time and often the disease had developed into an advanced stage.

An ambition to reform the psychiatric care
Cullberg had an ambition to reform the psychiatric care, tear down the walls and make it more available for all members of society. He was attracted by the "Nacka-project", an enterprise created by the psychiatrist Bengt Berggren during the seventies. In Nacka, a community in the Stockholm area, the psychiatric care was organized in a completely new way. As an alternative to hospital care, the citizens could easily get in touch with psychiatric treatment at small units close to home. Within a sector, i.e. a limited geographical area, all kinds of treatment were made available. This model was revolutionary and the rest of Sweden soon adopted the principles and the psychiatric care was reorganized all over the country.