MOVIE AND THEN THERE WAS LIGHT PROFESSIONAL
The film was made as one of the early entries in the Army's Professional Medical Film series, which began in 1945.
The film ends with some of the featured patients participating in a ceremony in which they are discharged, not just from the hospital, but from military service, and returned to civilian life. The documentary shifts its tone to a sense of normalcy, with the soldiers performing regular activities and complaining about everyday problems. Therapists reassure the patients that there is no shame in receiving treatment for their mental conditions and that civilians subjected to the same stresses would develop the same conditions. The treatments are followed by classes (designed to reintegrate patients into civilian life) and group therapy sessions. Another is given an intravenous injection of sodium amytal to induce a hypnotic state, curing him of his mental inability to walk. One soldier with amnesia is hypnotized to remember the trauma of the Japanese bombings on Okinawa and his life before that point.
Various treatment methods are shown are depicted, such as narcosynthesis, hypnosis, group psychotherapy, music therapy and work therapy. Next are scenes of interviews between a doctor and some of the patients about their problems and the circumstances leading to that point.
They are brought into a room and told by an admissions officer to not be alarmed by the cameras, which will make a photographic record of their progress. service members-recent combat veterans suffering from various "nervous conditions" including psychoneurosis, battle neurosis, conversion disorder, amnesia, severe stammering and anxiety states-arrive at the facility. Veterans are transported from a medical ship to Mason General Hospital to be treated for mental conditions brought about by war. The film begins with an introduction stating that 20 percent of wartime casualties are of a psychiatric nature. The new title that Huston gave the film, Let There Be Light, was a reference to Genesis 1:3 of the King James Version of the Bible and alluded to the documentary's goal of revealing truths that were previously concealed as too frightening or shameful for acknowledgment. The reasons for the selection were that Mason General was the largest mental-health facility on the East Coast, that the hospital was located near the Army's motion picture production center at Astoria Studios in Queens and that the doctors were very open and receptive to the filming and any psychiatric questions that Huston had. Huston visited multiple Army hospitals on the East and West Coasts before deciding upon Mason General Hospital in Deer Park, New York, on Long Island. To convince the public, and especially employers, that veterans being treated for battle-induced mental instability were completely normal after psychiatric treatment, on June 25, 1945, the Army Signal Corps tasked Major John Huston with producing the documentary The Returning Psychoneurotics. Many veterans faced the stigma associated with " shell shock" or "psychoneurosis", the former terms for post-traumatic stress disorder. Army had the task of reintegrating returning military veterans into peacetime society. Demobilizing near the end of World War II, the U.S.