Word: bierer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Night Shift. Since 1946, Austrian-born Dr. Bierer has been running the Marlborough Day Hospital in London. Patients come, unsupervised, by public transportation, for a 7½-hour day, and return home at night. Then the night shift comes on: patients who have daytime jobs, and especially those whose family situations have had a major part in their illness. Dr. Bierer will soon open his "shift hospital" for weekend stays as well...
...Runwell in Essex, Dr. Bierer directs a "therapeutic community" of about 20 houses with 40 to 100 patients. He says: "To lock people up. one needs more rather than less staff; to keep people in chains, one needs other people to keep them clean. It is much less expensive to let them walk about and work and clean the place up for themselves. It is much less expensive to run day hospitals, workshops and hostels than to lock people...
...Britain, nearly 90% of mental patients are in unlocked hospitals; in the U.S.. less than 50%. Britain has 70 day hospitals; the U.S. only 25. The usual reaction of North American psychiatrists to the bearded Bierer's preachment is that U.S. legal and public opinion is not yet ready for a drastic change. The same arguments were advanced when a few progressive U.S. hospitals began to unlock their doors (TIME. Nov. 16, 1959). Yet patients free to come and go have committed no more crimes, caused no more trouble than the general population. The more freedom they have...
...Save a Billion? Dr. Bierer, who has a doctorate in economics as well as in medicine, also makes a dollars-and-cents argument. In the U.S., he says, 85% of the psychiatrists, concentrating on lengthy analytic methods, can treat only 15% of mental patients, leaving only 15% to treat the 85% of patients who are in hospitals. Day, night and weekend hospitals, intensively using group psychotherapy, make the ratio nearer even and incidentally enable psychiatrists, handling many more patients, to make more money. Potential savings in unlocking hospitals: $1 billion a year...
Britain's hardheaded Ministry of Health does not buy all the Bierer doctrine, but it goes a long way with him. It has just announced a plan to shut down 70,000 mental-hospital beds, or about half the nation's total, within 15 years. And Bierer gets support for his theories from two distant lands that have never had big hospitals: Nigeria and India...