Public Profile
The Bethesda Center for Civic Affective Disorders is a federally funded clinical research center located on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. Established in 2023 with a five-year cooperative agreement from the National Institute of Mental Health, the center is the first institution of its kind in the United States dedicated to the diagnosis, treatment, and longitudinal study of psychiatric conditions whose presenting feature is acute distress concerning the state of the polity.
The center occupies a renovated four-story brick building on the southern edge of the N.I.H. campus that was, until 2022, the home of a long-dormant program on adult bedwetting. Its current footprint includes a thirty-bed inpatient unit, an outpatient clinic, a pamphlet design lab, and what its annual report describes as “a quiet room calibrated for patients who find quiet rooms upsetting.”
Its founding director, Dr. Constance Halbritter, has described the center’s mission as “the clinical recognition of suffering whose object is not the patient’s life, the patient’s family, or the patient’s body, but the patient’s country.” The center coordinates the federal working group that secured the 2026 inclusion of Patriotic Derealization Syndrome in the latest revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and operates the country’s only inpatient program currently accepting referrals for severe cases.
The center’s research staff numbers thirty-four, drawn principally from psychiatry, clinical psychology, political science, and, since 2024, two scholars of liturgy whose appointments the center has declined to elaborate. Its papers have appeared in The American Journal of Psychiatry, JAMA Psychiatry, and Health Affairs.
Articles
- Diagnostic Manual Adds 'Patriotic Derealization Syndrome' as Patients Increasingly Report 'the America I Love Does Not Exist' — Patients can name the country and locate it on a map, researchers say. What they cannot do is feel that it is the same country.