Word: illing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...prepared to curb the uncontrollables. They seem politically sacrosanct because they are mostly transfer payments that go directly to citizens-for Social Security, Medicare, public assistance, veterans' benefits, civil service and military retirement funds. Nobody wishes to deprive further the aged and infirm, the poor and the ill. Yet the total bill for these benefits is expanding faster than the rate of inflation. Almost all legislators agree that the growth of Government spending should be reduced, but many are unwilling to face the wrath of lobbies for old people, veterans, civil servants and others...
Indeed, on every front, psychiatry seems to be on the defensive. Private groups with names like Alliance for the Mentally Ill are beginning to batter the profession and its hospitals with the same kind of malpractice suits that plague the rest of medicine. Many psychiatrists want to abandon treatment of ordinary, everyday neurotics ("the worried well") to psychologists and the amateur Pop therapists. After all, does it take a hard-won M.D. degree (a prerequisite psychologists do not need) to chat sympathetically and tell a patient you're-much-too-hard-on-yourself? And if psychiatry is a medical treatment...
...prove as important to humanity as that equation. We are on the edge of a new era." Also a Brave New World of mind-controlling drugs. Before long, according to some researchers, it will be possible to inject or extract chemicals to get almost any desired behavior, good or ill...
Psychiatrists themselves acknowledge that their profession often smacks of modern alchemy?full of jargon, obfuscation and mystification, but precious little real knowledge. The Patty Hearst trial was a typical embarrassment?one battery of distinguished psychiatrists neatly explained that Hearst was ill, another insisted that she was not. To radicals, feminists and homosexuals, psychiatry is just one more villainous agent of the status quo. More than a century ago, an antebellum psychiatrist blithely explained that slaves who tried to escape from their masters were suffering from "dromomania," the runaway disease. How does the public know that 20th century psychiatry...
...psychoanalytic chic ran high, generating optimism about its potential that far outran Freud's. The master, of course, thought he had made a decisive breakthrough, but one destined to be modified by other discoveries, some of them biological and chemical. Psychoanalysis, he said, could do little for the seriously ill, such as schizophrenics and other psychotics, and even many neurotics should expect little more than transforming "hysterical misery into common unhappiness." Even that might not be achieved if the patient was too old and set in his ways...