Persuasion and Healing was one of the most significant books for psychiatry and clinical psychology during the 20th century. Thirty years after it was first published, Frank was joined by his daughter, Julia B. Frank, in an expanded edition in 1991. After training in psychology and medicine at Harvard and Berlin, then psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University, he had come to formulate a truly fundamental question: what is happening when we make a troubled person better? In trying to answer this, Frank took the study of psychotherapy to a conceptually much higher level, doing so in a non-partisan manner in times when psychoanalysis was endemic and highly influential in America. He helped a whole generation think more deeply about psychotherapy, to see beyond the immediacy of the doctor–patient situation. The forces that are at work are also to be seen in religious healing ceremonies, in the prescription of a placebo and in rhetoric using hermeneutics. In each, the recipient is urged to accept the therapist's assumptive world and is expected to be the better for doing so.

From time to time in convict prisons examples are seen of certain morbid mental states which are described as distinct disease forms under the name of “prison psychoses.” These states may be defined as special types of mental reactions developing upon conflicts which arise as the result of imprisonment, and possibly from the shock attending the criminal act, trial and conviction. They have been the subject of much inquiry, but, on account of the variation in the material which was available and in the conditions under which the studies were pursued, some confusion of thought appears to exist as to what may or may not be regarded as belonging to this class of disorder, and whether, in fact, the classification is not redundant. The sole justification for the use of the term “true prison psychosis” lies in the ability to establish the disorder as a separate entity, lest the name should be applied to conditions which are adequately described under other titles, as has been the case with shell-shock and “barbed-wire” disease.

Preventive recall to hospital of a patient on a community treatment order can be lawful when it is based on a convincing prediction that relapse in illness would otherwise occur. The legislation for England and Wales provides several indications that authorising preventive recall in those circumstances is a purpose of the community treatment order regime.